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

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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.

.

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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.

Klandermans, B. (1997) The social psychology of protest, Oxford: Blackwells.

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.

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

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.

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.

Suarez-Orozco, M. & Qin-Holland, D.B. (eds) (2004) Globalisation; culture and education in the new Millennium, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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

There are three main narratives underpinning most discussions on the future of work. The first is that the formalisation of work is gathering pace, whereby products and services are increasingly being produced and delivered by the formal economy. Conversely, informal work, such as subsistence production, informal exchange and/or mutual aid, is rapidly becoming less relevant to everyday life. The second, known as the ‘commodification thesis’, suggests that capitalism is spreading into almost every corner of human activity. For example, this could include the marketisation of state functions or the pricing of environmental pollution such as carbon trading. The final narrative is that globalisation is gaining pace and that the path to development is the way of the free market, with nation states declining in economic importance. In other words the formal market knows the best course of action. Simultaneously, informal work, here taken to mean work that is not declared to the state but is legal in all other aspects, is seen as a brake on development and a residue of previous times.

Thus a binary division is constructed whereby the formal economy is seen as a positive, and thus the way to economic prosperity, while informal practices are cast in a negative light. For example, Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist, argued that the best way to formalise Latin America’s informal economies was to legally establish property rights (to allow people to borrow against them) and for the state to withdraw from everyday life. This echoes the policy prescriptions given in the late 1980s and early 1990s to Latin America and the former Soviet states by organisations such as the World Bank and the IMF. Central to these policies, which became known as the Washington Consensus, was that the formal market ‘knows best’ and as it grew people would be drawn into it. Formal work is also equated to ‘decent work’ as a recent report stated: “On the balance: The informal sector is dominant in developing countries … though its reduction is crucial for securing decent work”. This is, of course, not to say that all informal work is positive, as will be discussed further below, but such statements demonstrate the persuasiveness of the formal economy. Indeed the very terms used to describe informal work demonstrate its negative construction. Such practices are commonly referred to as ‘non-official’, ‘non-organised’, ‘hidden’, ‘black’, ’shadow’, ‘non-visible’, ’submerged’, ‘irregular’, etc. Thus informal work is almost always defined by what it is not, ie its lack of engagement with the formal economy.

Despite the widespread acceptance of the above narratives there is a growing literature that refutes such discourses. The prime reason for this is the recognition that in fact the informal economy is not disappearing and for many plays an important role in everyday life. Across the world informal economies are a significant percentage of GDP and there is evidence that their size is in fact growing. Friedrich Schneider estimated in 2006 that the size of the global shadow economy (as a percentage of GDP) was 35.2%, an increase of 1.6% from 1999/00. Of course within these figures there are wide variations between countries, ranging from the United States with a figure of 8.4%, to Bolivia with 68.3%. Only two countries have a single digit figure (the USA and Switzerland) with the vast majority over 20%. Very few countries have experienced a significant decrease in their shadow economy over this period. While the averages for the OECD countries are lower than the global figure, they still demonstrate the importance of informal economies in ‘developed’ regions of the world. Furthermore, Schneider states that between 1989 and 2002 the average size of the OECD countries’ informal sector rose by over a quarter. The International Labour Organisation has gone so far as to say that in the last thirty years the growth of informal economies has been ‘phenomenal’.

Most commentators accept that such figures are probably underestimates as people are, understandably, reticent to reveal the scale of their informal work due to fear of detection. Furthermore, surveys often fail to observe the full range of informal work, as respondents are unaware that some of their practices could be included. For example, people who provide unpaid care for others rarely state this in informal work surveys. What is clear, however, is that non-formal work is not decreasing in relevance: as Table 3 shows, in relation to the percentage of total work time devoted to unpaid work many major economies are moving towards informalisation.

Thus it can be seen that the formalisation and commodification theses are rather problematic. Not only do they ignore the fact that the informal economy is still significant but they also take a very narrow view on what constitutes economic activity. The following section demonstrates the wide variety of informal work practices, and some of the motivations behind them, in operation today.

The spectrum of informal work

As noted above, work is often split into a binary division, formal and informal. Such a narrow definition is very unhelpful when conceptualising informal practices, as it often leads to the assumption that it is only referring to ‘cash in hand’ work. However, forms of informal work are much broader than this. Discounting illegal activities the spectrum of informal practices includes unpaid work, volunteering, the exchange of goods, intergenerational transfers, mutual aid, ‘not for profit’ schemes, subsistence production (which includes not only growing your own food but also making/repairing clothes, etc), informal micro-enterprises and, of course, ‘cash in hand’ work. Gibson-Graham (two prominent geographers who critiqued the nature of the formal economy from a feminist perspective) developed an ‘iceberg’ analogy to show the diversity of the economy beyond the formal.

Within many of these practices profit is not the main goal, if it is a goal at all. Environmental and social justice concerns are often given priority and there is a sense that people wish to operate outside the mainstream economy. There are many reasons why people wish to do so. Of course the state, and most economists, would argue that people undertake such actions simply to avoid tax and/or that people from economically marginalised communities have no choice but to undertake such work. Again we can see that binary divisions are in operation (tax payment/avoidance, rich/poor); however, the motivations for engaging in such practices are far more diverse. Williams and Windebank have shown that in many instances it is those in higher income brackets who undertake cash in hand work (both as consumers and providers) as a means of increasing their income. Furthermore, it is not just about saving money. While the reduced cost of cash in hand work is a major attraction, other issues, such as reliability or not being able to afford the formal price, are important.

Enterprise formation is a major driver of the informal economy and again it is assumed that firms that operate in this manner are doing so solely to avoid taxation payments. Many micro-enterprises operate informally in the first instance, as the entrepreneur wants to see if the idea will work and become profitable before taking the step into the formal sphere. This is mainly due to the bureaucracy, time and costs involved in registering a formal firm. Migrants, for example, might find it difficult to obtain the information needed to register a firm or they might be unsure of the length of time they will be in the region. If the firm does become a success then the initial period of informality becomes a barrier to formalisation, as the entrepreneur might be unable to pay back taxes or is fearful of prosecution. Often enterprises that are not motivated by profit do not see the reason for formal registration as they do not want to spend time filling out forms or to be monitored by the state.

At the household level again there are many motivations for undertaking informal practices. Often it can be to save money; for example, there has been a reported increase in domestic food production in response to the recent rises in food prices. But in reality the motivations go much deeper than this. Growing one’s own food can have environmental and social considerations as well as cost benefits. It is also reported that there is a significant increase in intergenerational transfers and mutual aid, for example, parents helping their children raise a deposit for their first home or helping out with repairs. Although services such as childcare and household repairs are increasingly commoditised (right word??) many people prefer to keep such services within their social networks. Again the issue of cost is important but people also wish to ‘employ’ people they know and to use such exchanges as a way of building their social capital. For example, if you undertake some unpaid work for an acquaintance then they will be obliged to do some for you in return in the future. There is evidence that informal intergenerational support is increasing with young adults increasingly dependent on their parents. A study in the USA by the Institute of Social Research, found that between the ages of 18 and 34, young adults receive, on average, $38,000 in cash transfers, and perhaps more surprisingly, the equivalent of two years worth of full time labour. These figures, the researchers found, have increased dramatically over recent years.

Unpaid work within the home must also be considered within this spectrum. Such activities can take many forms such as childcare, caring and household jobs. While there has been some commodification of these processes, with, for example, an increase in ‘live-in childcare’ it is still not the norm. It is common for friends to group together to provide childcare to allow the other members to undertake formal work, an unofficial form of kindergarten, and there is an observed rise in the number of people providing ‘long distance granny nanny’ assistance. A time use survey conducted in 2005 by the Office of National Statistics found that on average people in Great Britain spent 142 minutes per day on unpaid housework. The survey found that 77% of men and 92% of women spent time each day undertaking such practices. This demonstrates both the gendered aspect of this informal economy and its importance to households.

Unpaid care giving provides perhaps the clearest example of the scale, and importance, of the informal economy within households. The Carers UK organisation estimates that almost six million people provide unpaid care within the UK and that the number grows by over 6,000 people every day. Buckner and Yeandle (2007) have calculated that this informal care giving has an economic value of over £87 billion per year. This is considerably more than the cost of formal health care in the UK with the cost of the National Health Service audited at £81 billion for 2006/7. Thus there is clear link between the formal and informal economies as the state, and the tax payer, would find it extremely difficult to provide health care without this informal support. As one of their interviewees states ’society would collapse without carers …’.

Volunteering outside the home is also an important factor in the relationships between the formal and informal economies. The 2001 Home Office Citizenship Survey found that 39% of people had volunteered formally in the previous 12 months and that 67% had done so informally. These are obviously significant figures and again demonstrate that for many people the formal economy is not their sole sphere of activity. The Community Service Volunteers organisation, applying the minimum wage to the unpaid work their volunteers undertook, estimated that the commodified value of their unpaid work was over £28 million in 2006/7, a significant input into local communities.

This necessarily brief overview of the forms of informal economic practices demonstrates that rather than a formal/informal economy there exists, as noted by Gibson-Graham in table below, a ‘diverse economy’. Many individuals/households employ a ‘livelihood jigsaw’ that comprises a range of both formal and informal practices. This is not a static relationship, as people move in and out of formal and informal spheres on a constant basis. However, it is clear that the informal economy is of vital importance to many people and often it provides the platform from which individuals are enabled to operate in the formal economy.

Sites of resistance or exploitation?

Although the above discussions detail the often positive aspects of informal work practices, when moving away from the traditional formal/informal definition care must be taken not to over romanticise informal work. Within the social sciences there is a trend to see informal work as an alternative, or resistance, to capitalism. While for some people this might be the case, for the majority of people the formal sphere still plays an important role in their everyday lives. By merely highlighting the positive another over-simplified dichotomy is put in place. As Smith and Stenning (2006, p3) state, ‘existing work on diverse economies … runs the risk of failing to problematize the forms of exploitation and inequality within the alternative, “non-capitalist” economies, despite theoretical cautions to the contrary’. Thus it is even more important here to realise that informal economies take many forms. Many of the practices described above can often be personally rewarding but they take up a great deal of time and, particularly in the case of care giving, there is little support and relief.

In many cases people wish to move their informal work into the formal sphere. Although intuitively it might seem a positive to avoid tax payments, in reality it provides many barriers. Such workers, or entrepreneurs, find it difficult to obtain credit and the lack of social security is a constant worry. In a similar theme it must also be remembered that in numerous cases workers have little choice but to work in an informal manner due to the actions of their employers. It might be that they are forced to accept cash in hand wages so the employer can avoid payroll taxes, or that informal payments are demanded to secure employment. The negative aspects of such work are numerous. Firstly, the worker has very little long-term security as he/she can be dismissed at will and there is no recourse if wage payments are not made. Secondly, such work is often exploitative, characterised by long working hours with no holiday or sick pay entitlements. Migrant workers might find that large deductions are made from their wages for their accommodation or they find themselves ‘tied’ to an employer to repay a transport or arrangement fee. Perhaps most seriously, however, is that such work often breaches Health and Safety regulations and is not subject to inspections. This can often lead to tragedy such as the deaths of twenty three Chinese cockle pickers in Morecombe Bay. While this is an extreme example, across the globe vast swathes of production are undertaken by economically marginalised ’sweatshop’ workers in dangerous conditions. By no stretch of the imagination could any of this paid informal work be construed as an alternative to capitalism in a positive way.

This is not to say that all informal work is negative. For many people it does provide a positive alternative to the formal sphere, be it for economic, ideological or environmental reasons. However, these positive/negative aspects again demonstrate the need for a much broader approach to the relationships between formal and informal spheres.

Virtual economies

In recent times new phenomena have developed in the informal economies – one of the most visible has been the rise of the car boot sale. This is semi-commodified as people have to pay for a pitch but the sale of goods is informal. This has also coincided with an increase in ’second hand’ shops on the high street – either for charity, exchange or sometimes profit.

Increasing internet use has led to the rise of sites such as eBay where people can sell goods on an informal basis. Often though such sites become mirrors of the formal economy with people setting up virtual shops – though of course one can speculate how much of the trading is still done informally (ie no tax is paid). There are numerous sites, however, dedicated to unpaid exchange and informal selling such as Craig’s list and Freecycle which demonstrate the importance of informal economies within virtual communities.

An interesting link between informal and formal economies is provided by online virtual world games such as Second Life, Entropia Universe and IMVU, for example, whereby currency earned in the game can be transferred out and converted to real currency – thus allowing people to earn money in virtual worlds. Conversely, items for game play, such as virtual ‘clothing’, ‘weapons’ etc can be purchased online on sites like eBay and transferred into virtual worlds. Also there is evidence of people being paid to play games in order to accrue experience and items for their ‘employee’ – thus the distinction between virtual and real formal/informal economies is becoming increasingly blurred. Furthermore, many real world firms are setting up online in Second Life, as are advertisers, etc. Universities also have a presence both in order to attract new students and teach current ones – therefore an informal space can easily become a formal site of commerce. Of course informal real world activities such as the distribution of pornography also take place in virtual worlds.

Probable futures

As the above has demonstrated, the informal economy is much more than merely a leftover from a previous time. It is clearly still of importance to many households and there is little evidence that it is declining in size. Given that informal economies have flourished during an era of rapid globalisation and the alleged commodification of everyday life, there is no reason to assume that they will diminish in importance over the next twenty-five years. If the current ‘credit crunch’ leads to a long period of recession then it can be expected to grow. This might be linked to formal work, such as ‘cash in hand’ work, in order to maximum household income. More likely, however, it will involve practices such as domestically produced food, the mending or making of clothes and an increase in domestic work, caring and childcare. Even when the economy grows rapidly as during the period from the early 1990s to 2007, this sustained economic growth has not led to a decrease in informal activity.

Despite the fact that the informal economy is not going to disappear it is probable that the state will continue to struggle to conceptualise the various forms of informal work and their relationship to the formal economy. This is somewhat understandable given the negative connotations of some spheres of the informal economy, as discussed above, and the fact that in certain situations it is exploitative, dangerous and illegal. Therefore, the relationship between the formal and informal will continue to be seen in binary terms, positive and negative respectively, for the foreseeable future. It would be very hard, for example, for any government to state that micro-entrepreneurs who are working ‘off the books’ have a positive impact upon the formal economy. Hence it is probable that government policy will concentrate on ’stick’ methods for trying to contain the informal economy, such as penalties for ‘cash in hand’ work and fines for previous tax evasion, rather than using incentives, such as ‘forgiveness’ for the previous non-payment of tax or ‘tax free’ or ‘tax deferment’ periods, to encourage micro-enterprises to move into the formal sphere.

Demographic changes will also impact upon the nature of informal economies. As Europe’s population ages then more people will perform unpaid caring roles as parents and friends require assistance in their later life stages. Furthermore, as life expectancy increases people will have more time to devote to informal activities post-retirement age. This will see an increase in grandparents providing childcare and other assistance to their children. Intergenerational transfers between parents and children will become even more important as student debt levels increase and first-time buyers continue to struggle to raise a deposit to purchase a house. Therefore, it is probable that children will remain at home for longer, often returning after university, receiving the informal support of their parents. This trend can also be seen in the rise of what is termed ‘helicopter parenting’ where the recent rise in communication technology has made it much easier for parents to remain in contact with their children, and conversely, children find it much easier to contact their parents if they need their support or a job done.

It is probable that there will be a growth in the importance of informal economies in, and around, virtual worlds. This will involve the growth of games such as Second Life and Entropia and the continuing importance of social networking sites. Sites such as Facebook will be used to share information and to alert people to opportunities in both the formal and informal economies. As environmental concerns grow over the next 25 years, the recycling and sharing of goods, such as the gifting of unwanted goods or car-pooling, will become increasingly common and will be facilitated by online communities and websites. Although the expected rise in home working, as a result of more effective ICT, has not materialised it can be expected that in 25 years time more people will be able to work from home. This, if working time does not increase correspondingly, will reduce the amount of time required for formal work (for instance, commuting will no longer add to the working day), leaving people with more time for leisure and informal activities. Such home working will also spur the creation of consultancies and micro-enterprises, which may begin in an informal fashion.

On a more negative note, if economic polarisation continues to grow at current rates then over the next twenty-five years increasing numbers of people will turn to informal economies in order to ensure the economic security of their household. This will be a mix of illegal and legal activities and will see people move even further from the formal sphere, and will possibly see an increase in levels of exploitation and unsafe working conditions.

Preferable futures

The most preferable vision is one where the meta-narratives surrounding the informal economy are broken down. It is hoped that there is a more widespread realisation that there is a wide spectrum of informal activities and that there are both positive and negative aspects to many of the practices. Perhaps the most important recognition is that in many cases the informal economy supports the formal economy. For example, without informal childcare some people would be unable to undertake formal work. It must also be realised that there is a deep social aspect to many informal practices that strengthen networks and often fulfil the formal role of the state, such as unpaid care giving.

If the varied nature of the informal is unpacked then it will be much easier to develop appropriate blanket policy responses rather than a ‘catch all’ approach. At one end of the spectrum, dangerous, criminal and large-scale informal activities such as drug and people smuggling should, obviously, be targeted with the full force of the law, while at the same time informal micro-enterprises should be incentivised into moving into the formal sphere. This could be facilitated by various policy measures such as a longer period where they can go unregistered, tax forgiveness or deferment, greater support, advice centres, access to accountants and tax advisors, etc.

A shift in culture towards rewarding entrepreneurship would also support such measures. For example, in the USA and Japan, entrepreneurs and innovators have a much higher public standing and as a result there is more of an entrepreneurial culture. The informal economy has an important role here as there is much less risk in operating informally in the gestation period of an enterprise – ie less money is invested, payments/time for registration are much lower. Furthermore, less punitive bankruptcy laws (and reduced stigma, which would arise from the culture change) would encourage people to take the steps into entrepreneurship and to try out ideas in the informal sphere before moving them into the formal.

In this preferable future employers who force employees into informal practices are clamped down upon, allowing those who wish their work to be formalised to do so. Furthermore, those undertaking informal work to support those in formal work, such as childcare or care provision, should have their efforts recognised and rewarded. This could be through direct payments or tax credits. Moving these roles into a more formal sphere would allow for training and support to be given. This is particularly important for those undertaking such work, such as school age children supporting parents. Increased social support facilities, such as childcare, would allow people to undertake formal work who otherwise would not have the time to do so – or who would be spending so much of their formal income on support as to not make it worthwhile to do so.

The preferable future would harness a more socially orientated economic model, where profit is not the main goal, which would assist all sections of society and harness the activities of both the formal and informal spheres. Volunteering and mutual aid would be promoted as key functions of society and Local Exchange Trading schemes (LETs) would flourish. While some of these actions might seem utopian in thinking and would cost the state money, the increase in tax revenue from the formalisation of informal enterprises would go some way to covering these costs. In short, informal economies are here to stay and the preferable future will be one that is able to harness their positive aspects for all of society.

The implications of the growth of the informal economy on education

The informal economy has a number of implications for education, especially in relation to lifelong learning. It can be argued that within schools there needs to be more discussion on the nature of informal economies and work. This would help promote the positive aspects of practices such as volunteering, mutual aid and the role of family and friendship networks in everyday life. On a more practical note as discussed above, there are a significant number of school age children who have to provide care to family members. The Education Network estimated in 2005 that there were around 175,000 school children who are devoting a significant amount of their time to caring for others. The Princess Trust for Young Carers notes that there are many problems that these carers face, such as a lack of time to do school work, limited social opportunities, unhealthy lifestyles (such as a lack of sleep due to night time care or limited shopping opportunities), amongst many others. All of these issues impact on their ability to enter the formal workplace when they leave school. While there is some attention paid to this problem there needs to be a greater understanding of the issue; for example, some schools believe no one attending their institution has to perform these roles.

Within the Higher Education sector, especially in Business and Management Schools, more attention needs to be paid to the varied nature of the informal economy. Business education would be an ideal place to start a broader rethinking of the ways in which informal economies could be drawn into the formal spheres. For example, entrepreneurs and managers in the formal sphere act as mentors to micro-enterprises, providing guidance on how they can formalise their work.

Arguably the biggest implication of the growth in informal economies on the education sector is in relation to lifelong learning. Workers in the informal economy develop many important skills that are relevant to the formal economy but often they are not recognised by formal employers. Furthermore, it can be difficult for informal workers to access courses aimed at developing different skill sets, for example the use of ICT in the workplace. While the government has set up numerous schemes aimed at helping people develop such skills they are often aimed at people who are not in work. This means it can be difficult for people who are working informally to access them, for example, because of a lack of time or childcare problems. This issue has been identified by the International Labour Organisation, which argues that such training must fulfil the following criteria:

• Training must be demand-driven
• Training must be targeted and needs-led
• Skills training for the informal economy needs to go beyond technical skills training
• Training has to be short, modest, and competency based
• Training should recognize complex livelihoods
• Training should be monitored and evaluated on an ongoing basis
• Trainers themselves should be adequately trained and capable of delivering quality training
• Both public and private training providers have important roles to play
• The level of skill adaptation impacts on the extent to which new technologies can increase productivity in the informal economy.

Another form of education/training that informal micro-enterprises would benefit from is the provision of centres that could provide confidential guidance on the procedures needed to move into the formal economy. This would include, for example, advice on tax, employment rights, and health and safety regulations. The confidential nature of such guidance would encourage entrepreneurs to come forward without the fear of penalties.

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.

Norwegian report on informal work

see Gershuny,2000; ILO, 2002a, b; Schneider and Enste, 2000; Williams, 2004a, b, 2005a, b; Williams and Windebank, 1999a, b)

2315 Schneider, F., Shadow Economies and Corruption All Over the World: What Do We Really Know?

Schneider, F., (2002) The Size and Development of the Shadow Economies of 22 Transition and 21 OECD Countries

http://www.cinterfor.org.uy/public/english/region/ampro/cinterfor/temas/informal/

On the Frontier of Adulthood: Theory, Research, and Public Policy (MacArthur Foundation Series) (Hardcover) by Richard A. Settersten Jr. (Editor), Frank F. Furstenberg Jr. (Editor), Ruben G. Rumbaut (Editor)

listen to http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/02/2008_19_thu.shtml

Oughton, E., Wheelock, J. and Baines, S. (2003) ”Micro-businesses and Social Inclusion in

Rural Households: A Comparative Analysis,” Sociologia Ruralis 43(4): 331-348

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/north_east/4088650.stm

Bender, 2004; Castree et al, 2004; Espenshade, 2004; Hapke, 2004; A. Ross, 2004; R. Ross, 2004

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/apr/13/schools.children

http://www.carers.org/professionals/young-carers/articles/transitions-to-adulthood-for-carers,3167,PR.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/apr/13/schools.children http://www.t-e-n.co.uk/index.php

http://www.jrf.org.uk/bookshop/details.asp?pubID=793

However, there has always been a strong boundary between the knowledge(s) produced within society and the knowledge that has been taught through official instruction in educational institutions. This is partly because education has been expected to fulfil a range of often competing functions which extend well beyond the passing on of knowledge.

Table 1.0 Typology of forms of knowledge

Schools have always taught and transmitted a selected range of knowledge according to the social, political and economic needs that are perceived to be important in a specific era. As Hargreaves points out:

Since the emergence of compulsory schooling and its spread across the world, state education has repeatedly been expected to save society. Schools and their teachers have been expected to rescue children from poverty and destitution; rebuild nationhood in the aftermath of war; to develop universal literacy as a platform for economic survival; to create skilled workers even when little suitable employment has beckoned them; to develop tolerance among children where adults are divided by religious and ethnic conflict; … to eliminate drugs and violence and make restitution for the sins of the present generation by reshaping how education prepares the generations of the future.’ (Hargreaves, 2003, p3)

Thus the purposes of education are multiple, although we might identify three elements: to foster a particular kind of citizenry, to prepare a future workforce, and to provide young people with ways to reflect on and navigate pathways through life. These purposes are not necessarily compatible and in different eras and circumstances some, yet not others, may be prioritised. Furthermore, rather than being able to ’save society’ it has to be recognised that learning takes place in social contexts that cannot be fully insulated from the social, economic and personal situations in which young people experience life. There is a growing sense that educational institutions need to be more open to the experiences that young people have if they are to foster successful learning, especially for groups whose everyday lives are insecure, chaotic and limited due to poverty and other forms of disadvantage. Young people who are secure, safe and materially comfortable are likely to benefit from education in whichever institution they find themselves. Schools can probably make the greatest difference to groups whose everyday lives are marked by disadvantage. Yet, such groups historically gained access to formal schooling later than groups with higher socio economic status (SES) and so traditionally have not been imagined as legitimate participants within educational institutions. A recent report publish by the Rowntree Foundation found that white, British boys from poor families (Cassen and Kingdom, 2007) achieve less well in secondary education than any other group including working class girls and Afro-Caribbean boys. A recent report by the Sutton Trust in conjunction with the LSE found ‘that social mobility has stagnated and is at its lowest point for decades’ (ibid., 2007). Furthermore forms of instruction have changed little across the long history of schooling. A ‘deep grammar’ has remained at the heart of schooling in which teaching is ‘conducted from the front, through lecturing, seatwork and question and answer methods, with separate classes of age-like children, evaluated by standard paper-and-pencil methods’. (Hargreaves, 2003, p4). Major challenges for education in the future will be to develop school curricula that are more inclusive and to broaden the repertoire of instruction (pedagogy) and assessment.

The school curriculum and working class groups

In the following section I shall describe the origins of the relationship between the academic curriculum and elite masculinity: that is, masculinity valued by groups with high SES. In this section I shall point to some issues that relate to working class masculine identities. There has long been a powerful association between masculinity, skill, and work of the body rather than of the mind in working class communities. Since the industrial revolution, being skilled was associated with being independent and being a good man (Schwartz Cowan, 1997, cited in Murphy and Whitelegg, 2006). Skills were learned in workplace apprenticeships and therefore were tied to specific fields of production and their earning power gave them value (Willis, 1977). Technical competence was associated with masculinity in opposition to femininity (Wajcman, 1991). Because the high status of manual and technical skills derived from their relationship with fields of productivity they were not associated with educational qualifications (Ivinson and Murphy, 2007 p67). This remains a challenge when it comes to teaching work related skills within schools (Brown, 1987; Brown and Lauder, 1992, 2001; Brown and Hesketh, 2004; Brown et al, 2001)

Debates about whether the school curriculum should be taught as subject content or skills including ‘technical skills’ and ‘life skills’ can be traced back to the end of the 19^th century (Barnes, 1982; Brent, 1978; Green, 1990; Green et al, 1995, 1997, 2003; Hirst, 1974; Hodkinson, 1998, 2000; Hogarth et al, 2003; Illich, 1973; Jones et al, 1995; Lawton, 1980; Lloyd et al, 2003; Moore et al, 1995; Pring, 1976; Young, 1977). However, the UK, in comparison to other European countries, has been slow to develop technical education as a specialist field requiring specific expertise (Green, 1999; Green and Steedman, 1997; Hobsbawm, 1968; Roderick and Stephens, 1978; Sanderson, 1994; Steedman et al, 1995) and the secondary school curriculum has remained dominated by subject content. There are expectations that the future workers within the so called ‘knowledge economy’ will be required to integrate forms of knowledge in order to act in an uncertain world with ingenuity, invention, initiative, flexibility and creativity (Brown et al, 2001a, 2001b, 2004; Hargreaves, 2003, Leitch, 2006). The gap between what is taught in schools and what will be required for the future appears to be widening as traditional canons, and ways of producing knowledge are changing due to the information revolution. The new skills based curriculum with personal learning pathways has been proposed as one solution to the disparity between practices inside and outside schooling.

The specific skills relating to workplaces are hard to teach in schools because the learning contexts need to replicate some of the conditions of laboratories, workshops and retail environments where specific skills are practiced, including the authentic production of goods that can be sold. It is easier for schools to teach generic skills, such as problem solving, communication, planning, and flexibility required for a wide range of occupations (Felstead et al, 2002, 2007). Such skills have become associated with the citizen-workers of the new ‘knowledge economy’ (DfEE, 2001b; DTI, 1998, 2001). These skills are meant to be delivered through all subjects and at all levels of the national curriculum in England and Wales, and referred to as ‘Key Skills’ in curricular documents.

As dominant political discourses struggle to change the nature of curricular knowledge, rhetoric about generic skills as transferable commodities is growing. We tend to talk as if knowledge can circulate like money. However, the notion that skills are disembodied and can be learned in any context irrespective of their relevance to such contexts is highly problematic. Bernstein (1990, 1996) has predicted that the focus on generic skills as transferable commodities has created an illusion that somehow skills can be removed from the person and from the process of knowing. The creeping shift in curricular knowledge towards skills-led qualifications points to a weakening of traditional boundaries (Bernstein, 1990; 1996) between school and work. There is a danger that the link between education and production will only be effective for the higher levels of education experienced mainly by groups with high SES. We are in danger of producing a new division of labour arising from the information technology revolution: those who work and those who train (Bourne, 2000, p42), with working class groups being prepared for a life time of retraining rather than a life time of employment (Jones et al, 1995; Willis, 1984).

I wish to argue in the following section that subject knowledge(s) taught in schools are cultural constructions that have long historical legacies. Any proposed or imagined shift in curricular content and teaching method needs to take into account the values, including class and gender values embedded within the cultural streams that make up the elements of the curriculum. Subject knowledge, such as physics or literature, was historically produced through practices that included and excluded particular social groups from participation in the construction of subject based, ideas, logic and meanings. These legacies remain active today (Ivinson and Murphy, 2007). Therefore when subject knowledge is made available to students in classrooms it acts as cultural material that provides resources for constructing social identities. For example, some middle class girls may find it liberating to gain access to historically male territories such as physics and mathematics, while some middle class boys may find that participating in domestic or vocationally oriented courses clashes with their endeavours to conform to high status masculinity within peer and other social groups. Yet, as Walkerdine (1988, 1990, 1998, Walkerdine et al, 2001) has shown even when girls cross into historically male, high status, territory there is a cost. Our ethnographic work backs up Walkerdine’s findings that when girls and indeed boys cross into knowledge territories that have the opposite gender value to their emergent gender identities, they experience conflict. Managing this conflict takes effort and requires support and back up. Schools can provide this support yet traditionally they do not because they are influenced by the historical legacies that associate certain groups with specific knowledge forms and not with others.

Curricular interventions that wish to shift the school curriculum in order to meet the needs of the future knowledge economy have to recognise the historical legacies attached to different forms of subject knowledge. The following section alludes to the cultural legacies of knowledge as a first step to planning curriculum change and to predicting which kinds of curricular intervention are likely to succeed or fail.

2.0 Knowledge and learning

Within academic institutions formal instruction is differentiate from people’s practical experience. The subject disciplines that make up school and university curricula can broadly be classified as ’scientific’ knowledge. Scientific knowledge, in contra-distinction to knowledge gained through personal experience, has publicly available criteria which govern how ideas are aligned within the discipline. These criteria are usually maintained by the communities that practice disciplinary knowledge and are often recorded in texts and manuals and embodied in the practices of members of scientific communities. ‘Scientific and common sense knowledge are often viewed as an opposition between abstract and concrete thinking’ (cf. Dowling, 1998). Universities and schools continue to value abstract knowledge over applied know-how. This distinction is maintained within the school curriculum as academic and vocational subjects. However the distinction does not reflect how people learn nor does it capture the way knowledge in any domain was, is and will be produced in the past, present or future. One of the major challenges for educational institutions will be to break down the hierarchy between abstract, applied and personal knowledge, in order to promote ingenuity, invention and creativity required for future ‘knowledge societies’ (Hargreaves, 2003). The classification of knowledge into the broad categories of ‘abstract’, ‘applied’ and ‘personal’, although useful for analytical purposes does not reflect the way people learn. Learning is a process in which knowledge, whether of mathematics or art, changes form as the learner encounters, absorbs and recreates knowledge. For example, coming to have abstract subject principles can be achieved through a process of continuous practice in which personal experiences provide the means for recognising and grasping unfamiliar concepts. There is a need to make a distinction between the classifications of forms of knowledge – the curriculum – and how knowledge is learned.

Learning is a process that takes place over time in which what is learned passes through many different states, including practice, making links, applying to different contexts and abstracting principles. Learning a subject in school can not be divorced from the personal experiences of the student (Lave, 2008). Even learning how to manipulate symbols in abstract systems such as mathematics involves desire, affect and personal investment.

The struggle over the curriculum and pedagogy has taken a new turn in late modernity as a battle between the world-view of the Enlightenment project and post-modern relativism. The post-modern turn rejects that there is a central meaning to the universe that can be discovered through scientific investigation and that instead there are multiple truths depending on the perspective of the learner/observer. This entails that in any situation there is no one meaning; there are multiple meanings. We are struggling to find pedagogic approaches that can do justice to the post-modern condition. If every voice is to be heard in the classroom then how will formal knowledge be produced? Yet if subject principles are imposed as rules then we risk alienating many groups such as working class boys, girls and minority ethnic groups who may not recognise the dominant code of academic culture (Bernstein, 1996; Keddie, 1971). One recent solution proposed by the Twenty-twenty Society is to individualise education so that each student has a personal tutor and sets their own learning targets. This places the responsibility for learning with the individual.

A socio-cultural approach to learning views the problem in a different way: not as a problem of individual identity, so much as a problem of culture. The emphasis is placed on the multiple settings that the student inhabits across the school day and week. Through their participation within a diversity of settings such as science, English and technical subjects such as Design and Technology, students develop an understanding of the specific codes, concepts and activities that belong to a diverse range of communities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998; Ivinson and Murphy, 2007). Learning comes from becoming a competent actor in each community and it is the contrast between what is acceptable practice in one setting, such as the science laboratory, that enables to students to recognise what is acceptable within a different setting, such as a drama studio. Learning takes place as students move between settings and experience the specificity of the practices that belong to each community. Students have to develop identities reflecting membership in multiple subject communities of practice. Identity is as much about recognition and validation as it is about self expression (Duveen, 2001). How a boy or girl is recognised within a specific subject community of practice is marked by the legacy of who in the past was identified with that knowledge. These legacies exert an influence that can be referred to as the core gender-knowledge identities carried by different subjects of the curriculum (Ivinson and Murphy, 2007). Learning involves becoming a competent participant in multiple communities of practice within the school. Disciplinary and vocational subjects carry and offer pedagogic identities that have gender values attached to them. As students move between subjects they have to negotiate social identities based on the possibilities and restrictions offered within each community of practice. A socio-cultural approach recognises that learning is fundamentally social rather than an individual process.

The problem with reclassifying elements of the curriculum as skills is that it confuses two issues, namely the classification of knowledge and the process of learning. Given the deep historical roots attached to different elements of the curriculum, which are maintained and reinforced by elite universities, it is most unlikely that renaming subjects as skills will achieve any significant change in which groups achieve and which do not in a subject. However, the term ’skill’ suggests process as opposed to subject content and therefore appears to offer a useful way forward. However, instead of focussing on skill there is a need, first, to recognise how the learning process takes place, and second, to recognise that groups are differentially positioned with respect to subjects even before they enter the classroom due to the class and gender identities that are brought into school by students. These are not fixed identities although society sets up limits on how, for example, a working class boy can express himself if he wants to ‘get it right’ (Davies, 2003 pp9-10) as a boy in the face of peers, teachers, parents and the other social groups to which he wishes to belong (or not). Participating in a school subject has consequences for the construction of class and gender identities because subjects offer cultural material for expressing, performing and being recognised as the one ‘who is good at’, or ‘no good at’ activities. Activities such as ‘writing romance’, ‘using sanding machines in Design and Technology’, or ‘painting pink coloured flesh in Art’ are not class or gender neutral. To be seen painting pink flesh can be quite threatening for a working class boy (Ivinson and Murphy, 2007, p138-140). Students have to manage these identities and we have seen them protect themselves by refusing to participate in activities that challenge, for example, a working class male or an elite feminine identity. By recognising the historical roots and legacies of subject knowledge it is possible to take account of the class and gender associations that elements of the curriculum carry even today.

3.0 Class and gender connotations attached to curricular knowledge

Elements of the curriculum have class and gender associations that derive from deep historical legacies about practice, ie who had access to educational institutions in the past. Within educational institutions which class and sex groups had access to high status academic subjects and to vocational or other applied subjects remained at the heart of the school structure arguably up until very recently.

The hierarchical valuing of abstract knowledge within the academy can be traced back to the Greco-Roman curriculum inherited by Western Christianity. Manual practices were never integrated into ‘formal public systems of knowledge transmission’ but were passed on through family and guilds (Bernstein, 1996, p 22). The dichotomy and hierarchical valuing of abstract and applied knowledge goes back a long way. Greek society gave the Trivium (logic, grammar and rhetoric) high status and the Quadrivuim of applied knowledge (geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music) lower status. The Trivium is the exploration of the ‘word’ or text. The Quadrivium is abstract knowledge about the structure of the ‘outer’ world, broadly speaking ‘mathematics’. The final set of subjects in the ancient curriculum, known as the mechanical disciples, included medicine and architecture which were dropped from the classification of formal knowledge in the 5^th century (Ovitt, 1987) and reappeared again much later. There was a strong classification of knowledge into mental and manual practice (Bernstein, 1996, p22). This distinction can also be mapped onto social representations of masculinity and femininity.

Elite or esoteric masculinity became associated with abstract knowledge. Cultivating interiority though practices of contemplation and meditation with the aid of sacred texts became central to the Christian tradition practiced in the medieval monasteries which were the first institutions of learning. Within the medieval monastery, monks and priests removed themselves from the mundane necessities of everyday life, dressed in sack cloth and denied the flesh and their appetites. Development of inner consciousness or interiority was privileged and the work of the body was downgraded. The mental-manual dichotomy has remained tied to social class distinctions. By the 13^th century this duality was reinforced by the total exclusion of women from the high offices of the church and hence from contemplation and the development of interiority. Woman became associated with exteriority, the world, caring, nurturing and containing. The idea of passive ‘mother earth’ as a realm which man manipulated and controlled remained central to how technology was imagined. Notions that girls are not technical still circulate today.

The Trivium dominated the secondary school curriculum from the first Grammar schools in the 14^th century up until around 1870 (Jarman, 1963). The resilience of school curricula to resist the inclusion of new subjects despite the rise of the scientific method in the 17^th century and the enormous advanced in engineering technology that fuelled the Industrial Revolutions is a remarkable phenomena and draws attention to the deeply conservative nature of school knowledge. The academic school curriculum remained divorced from the sphere of economics right up until the 1870s so that no one would have expected a grammar school boy to emerge from education equipped to take up his position in the world of work (see Ivinson and Murphy, 2007, pp75-76).

The most abstract systems of knowledge such as mathematics and logic carry strong masculine associations (Willis, 1989). If the Trivium aimed to forge a certain kind of citizen, it was most definitely that relating to elite masculinity to the exclusion of other social groups. ‘In the seventeenth century the discourse about the scientific method mapped versions of masculinity onto cultural representations of scientific ways of knowing and acting that were celebrated by the scientific community’ (Brawn, 2000, cited in Ivinson and Murphy, 2007, p69). Abstraction, objectivity and logic became associated with masculinity and the mind.

Women and the working classes were not considered worthy of proper education until the 20^th century. Femininity became associated with the lived world, nature and holism. Because women were imagined as nurturers concerned with people, so they became less imaginable as scientists. Even today girls struggle with the conflict between the personal and caring values of femininity and being good at science and mathematics (Walkerdine, 1988, 1998). English did not become a subject in universities until the 1930s and up until then it was considered ‘fit for women, workers and those wishing to impress the natives’ (Eagleton, 1983 p29, cited in Ivinson and Murphy, 2007, p76). The purpose of education for upper and middle class girls was further influenced by the strict demarcation of life into the public and private realms. This resulted in an education designed for no purpose beyond attaining a husband and the culturally valued accomplishments required to entertain his friends’ (Purvis, 1991, cited in Ivinson and Murphy, 2007, p20). ‘These included conversational knowledge of some foreign languages, the ability to play musical instruments, to sing and to embroider. The greater the extent of her accomplishments, the greater a woman’s cultural capital would be in the marriage marketplace’ (Ivinson and Murphy, 2007, p20).

In contrast, working class children’s education was generally tied to their future lives as labourers and it was only recently that working class children gained access to an academic curriculum as a legal entitlement. This historical legacy created an allegiance between working class groups and non academic knowledge, ie knowledge gained though the family, guilds and personal experience. Before the Education Act of 1870 only a minority of working class children were in full time schooling and for girls it was approximately 10% of the female population (Purvis, 1991). Working class children were educated to spell and to read the Bible but not to write their own texts. If the masses could write, it was argued, they might be tempted to produce texts of their own (Hunt, 1972, cited in Robinson, 2000). If the masses could not write, the state could at least control the texts that they read.

Social class values are attached to knowledge domains and as with gender values they remain active in contemporary classrooms and are reinforced unwittingly by teachers. Furthermore, students choose to align themselves with particular subjects depending on where they feel they have a legitimate sense of belonging or allow them to express an emergent class and gender identity (Ivinson and Murphy, 2003, 2007). For example, we have found middle class boys limiting their involvement in Design and Technology as activities that activity aligns with working class traditions (Ivinson and Murphy, 2007, p112). The interaction between the social identities extended to students by teachers’ pedagogic instruction and the identities students bring with them into school as class and gendered citizens tends to reinforce the hierarchical stratification of subjects. Relationships between middle class boys with science and mathematics and working class boys with vocational courses, between middle class girls and the humanities and languages and working class girls with domestic vocational courses are strong patterns that can be detected in achievement measured by GCSE subjects taken and grades attained. Such longitudinal trends alert us to the conservative nature of educational institutional change. Despite speculations about new forms of curricula, such as skills-based curricula, the values carried by subject cultures are likely to be intractable and possibly may become further exaggerated over the next 40 years.

3.1 Present Curricula

Throughout the history of schooling social groups have had a differential access to and experience of curricular subjects. The notion that all students should have access to all subjects of the curriculum up to age 16, lasted for only a brief period of time, peaking with the national curriculum in England and Wales in 1988. The national curriculum in England and Wales made the full range of curricular subjects available to all students for the first time. The subjects of the curriculum were classified as core (science, English and Mathematics) and foundation (History, Geography, Modern Foreign Language Music, Art, Design and Technology, Physical Education, Religious Education)

Over the last decade a range of new subjects have entered the curriculum and there has been some relaxation on the compulsory need for all student to take all subjects. Some groups may be exempt from taking a Modern Language at GCSE. New subjects such as applied technologies have grown, as has generic training. The new applied subjects are assessed and accredited GCSEs or VGCSEs and are supposed to address skills in applied fields. In this new curricular organisation GCSE Art can be studied as a VGCSE in Applied Art and Design, and GCSE science as a VGCSE in Applied Science. Generic (training) pedagogies represent knowledge as a transferable commodity that has exchange value in the market.

The new 14-19 education documents signal a diversification in learning pathways to encompass academic, applied and vocational routes. This suggests a transformation of the ‘ideal’ student from one who can master ‘academic’ subject principles towards the new citizen-worker of late modernity who ideally possesses generic skills, flexibility and heightened individuality. New pathways to learning introduced in the 14-19 curriculum (QCA, 2000, WAG, 2002) such as Vocational GCSEs were part of a range of hybrid academic/vocational courses aimed at addressing the low status of ‘applied’ subjects. The increasing use of the term ’skill’ in curricular documents points to a weakened of traditional boundaries between school and work, (Bernstein, 1990, 2001). The multiplicity of new vocational courses in secondary schools is supposed to fulfil two aims: to re-engage disaffected groups, and to provide appropriate silks for the globalised economic market. However, we found that 13/14 year old boys still value traditional masculine skills rather than ‘generic’ skills (Ivinson and Murphy, 2007).

3.2 Future curricula?

It is most likely that over the next three decades elite universities will continue to exert considerable control over what counts as high status knowledge, regulated by entry requirements that will remain tied to academic subjects. It is likely that elite universities will continue to recognise academic rather than vocational qualifications for a range of reasons. Their allegiance will probably retain vestiges of the Greek ideal that scholars should learn to think before applying knowledge to the world. The main function of a university is to advance knowledge, and pure research requires some autonomy from the state and economic markets. The 1980s and 1990s have been characterised as an era of plenty that has seen the rapid expansion of the number of students in higher education. This increase is possibly not going to be sustainable in a coming era of scarcity. The school curriculum will probably not continue to be a purely academic curriculum as recent policy documents have pointed out. There will therefore be a further fragmentation of curricular knowledge. However, this fragmentation will be experienced differently by different groups. If strongly defined subject disciplines give way to hybrid knowledge forms this will probably not affect groups with high SES who will continue to follow a traditional academic curriculum.

For some students much learning in school is viewed as irrelevant and this is exacerbated in locales where there is high unemployment. In such areas even gaining certificates will not lead to a job making it difficult for students to invest in and feel any sense of belonging in schools. With the collapse of the industrial base and the scarcity of apprenticeships the group of students who find education irrelevant and who find it difficult to imagine viable economic futures will probably increase.

4.0 Changes in Pedagogy and Communication

The right hand column of table 1.0 lists the institutions where knowledge resides and is created. If knowledge is codified and recorded in texts which are stored and available in libraries and universities such knowledge is potentially available to all, even if access to books is variable. The capacity to store data in digital and virtual forms exponentially increases society’s ability to codify and retain information for future generations.

Knowledge that is codified and stored in texts is enduring and so accessible across a long time frame. Some ancient Greek and Roman texts are still available for scholars to access today. Universities are institutions that codify and record knowledge, and therefore are the sites where knowledge is produced, although this may be changing. The capacity to store knowledge electronically may well shift the central role of universities as the places where new knowledge is produced. The role of the WWW is likely to increase. One effect of the WWW is that knowledge becomes democratised: all citizens can potentially access ‘all’ information.

The subjects of the school curriculum were versions of university knowledge up until recently, before the curriculum became diversified to include vocational subjects and, more recently, generic skills. Such knowledge was passed on to the next generation via pedagogic instruction, usually a via transmission model. According to this model students are relatively passive recipients and teachers drill, instruct and explain subject principles to them. This style of teaching has been around for 4,000 years (Cole, 2003) and will remain a form of instruction in schools in the future.

A ‘child centred’ pedagogic intervention grew up in the 1920s and had some influence on the primary school curriculum after WWII, epitomised in the Plowden Report (1961). According to this model the child is viewed as an active learner who is given artefacts and problems to solve. Although this model has some influence on the primary school curriculum it has been far less prevalent in secondary schools. Although a transmission model has tended to dominate in practice students undertake a diverse range of activities in subject lesson only some of which are dominated by reading texts and writing. Practical work takes place in science, D&T, art, music and ICT, while independent research, project and coursework takes place in the Humanities, English, Modern Languages and Religious Education and Citizenship. However, assessment tends to be dominated by written test, despite the various attempts to broaden the media through which assessment takes place. The assessment practices in a subject will always have a strong influence on the pedagogic modality adopted by teachers.

In the future, new pedagogic practices involving virtual media, designed virtual classrooms and specialist software for teaching, for example, literacy and numeracy skills will be developed. These media will only dominate in schools if assessment practices also use such media. If university entry requirements change to incorporate electronic assessment tasks, these will rapidly become available in schools. However, due to the limitations of marking assessments electronically (eg multiple choice questions and answers) it is unlikely that elite universities will choose electronic marking in the near future. Electronic assessment for basic skills such as some literacy and numeracy skills is available and is likely to increase in schools for non-academic courses. Such forms of assessment are cheap, easy to apply and efficient. However, they can de-skill teachers and remove the human face of learning from disaffected groups who are likely to become increasingly disengaged. Once the novelty of working on a computer wears off, computer-based learning becomes mechanical and repetitive. The language laboratories introduced into secondary schools in the 1970s were heralded as a pedagogic break-through yet their appeal lasted less than a decade. There will remain a need for face-to-face human interaction in good quality teaching and learning. We may already be unwittingly further alienating disaffected groups of students by teaching through electronic media. Such groups are arguably those who most need human interaction as part of their learning.

The growth of online discussion fora for mature learners has been developed and is likely to increase. Many young people already use online chat rooms and fora such as Facebook to do homework. Different groups of young people will have differential access to, and ability to use, such media including web 2.0 technologies to enhance their learning. The following section turns to this problem and links to changes in family structures.

5.0 Changes in family structures

We are moving ‘increasingly into second, third and even fourth partnerships with extended families of a complicated and demanding nature. The family as a supporting environment will change, though how is unclear’ (Harper, 2008, p4)

Already many students live between two and sometimes three households. Some children live in households with siblings from two, three or more partnerships. They have relationships with parents who live in different households and see them occasionally. Sometimes over the course of their schooling young people will live with a variety of parents in a variety of different households. The range of parenting patterns is becoming increasingly diverse. Some households are busy and noisy because there are siblings from two or three or more relationships, making it difficult for students to find the space and quiet to do homework. At the other end of the spectrum there are children who have stable parenting experiences and due to decreasing fertility rates parents can support their children with high levels of cultural and economic capital. For some children, preparation for schooling starts early and parents provide a higher level of learning support than in previous generations, because they have high levels of education themselves. There is a wide variation in children’s experiences of home life and parental support and this will most likely continue to widen. The gap between children in poverty and affluence is widening and will be exacerbated by differential fertility rates between social groups. In some socio-economic groups women become mothers early and in others late. Even although the population is not rising in the UK the pattern of fertility is different across social class groups. These trends suggest that childhood poverty will most likely rise.

One of the important issues for educational achievement is how much support young people get from home. Some parents are able to provide a range of support based on their knowledge of the education system, their willingness to structure time for homework and pay for tutors. Other parents lack time, financial resources and knowledge of the education systsm.

Access to ICT at home is likely to become increasingly important as virtual media are used for pedagogic purposes. However, access alone is not enough in itself to ensure educational support. Some groups of young people access ICT for leisure activities dominated by game playing. Other groups of young people use ICT to meet, chat and exchange information including homework information. However, it is likely that using ICT for educational support will not be spread evenly across socio-economic groups. In some communities the WWW is viewed with suspicion and is associated with pornography. In other homes access to the WWW is seen as an important source of information and children are encouraged to become ICT literate. There is a third group of young people, often boys, who are using ICT to create websites and fora for mobilising and exchanging information. These groups are practicing skills that will help them to gain high level symbolic resources and prepare them for jobs in the new creative, technological industries. This may change as the technologies become main stream. Middle class groups have been more readily associated with the creative aspects of literacy that allow them to construct new meanings while working class groups have tended to be given less encouragement to use literacy to assert autonomy, negotiate and create meanings. This pattern is likely to be replicated with respect to ICT literacy. Schools will be presented with a serious challenge to make ICT technologies and media available to groups with low SES so they can used ICT to mobilise, create and be inventive. Historical legacies suggest that only with enormous political will backed by considerable resources will this be achieved in the future. It is much more likely that ICT technologies will be used in schools to control disaffected groups (cf. Apple, 2000).

6.0 Discussion around the skills curriculum

Harper (2008) predicts a future skills shortage due to changing demographics. By 2020 almost half the population will be aged 50 and older, creating a mature population. There will be a shortage of young people.

The skills required in the global market are not the same as the manual and technical skills valued in traditional working class communities. Research points out that instead of motivating disaffected boys many school-based vocational courses have led to cynicism because they fail to provide boys with the skills needed for work or for their imagined futures (Stanton and Bailey, 2005; Nuffield, 2008a and b). There is a mismatch between the ways boys recognise skill and the way skills are presented in school. The political intention to raise the school leaving age to 18 by 2015 places schools under increasing pressure to develop pedagogic practices appropriate to boys with low SES. If we are to re-engage this group of boys in school we will have to develop appropriate pedagogies that value work of the body and hand as well as of the mind (Arendt, 1998/1958; McWilliam 1995 cited in Bourne, 2000, p43). However, there is deep confusion over the meaning of the terms “skill” and “vocational”. According to Bernstein neither term can adequately provide a meaningful education as they are interpreted and instantiated in school curricula at the moment.

The increasing use of ’skills’ as a synonym for both VET and its outcomes – eg ‘Education and Skills’, ‘Learning and Skills’ causes confusion in policy and provision (Stanton and Bailey, 2005). Stanton and Bailey (2005) argue that blurring the boundaries between schooling and work may be counter-productive because the higher status academic qualifications, assessments and pedagogies will most likely dominate in schools and the vocational courses will lose their distinctive qualities and become ‘cheap’ training grounds for low level basic literacy, number and ICT skills (Bernstein, 2001, Bourne, 2000) or more pessimistically prepare boys for life long training rather than work (Keep, 2002, 2005).

In contrast to skills required by employers in specific areas of business, such as leisure and finance, ‘generic’ skills are said to be required by the citizen-workers of the new ‘knowledge economy’ (DfEE, 2001; DTI, 1998, 2001) and include flexibility and heightened individuality (Goldthorpe, 2003). In curriculum documents generic skills include literacy, number, and ICT skills on the one hand and communication skills on the other. These are skills that are supposed to be transferable between school and work. Prior research demonstrates however, that the contextual framing of skills dominates so that young people do not recognise skills acquired in one context when they move to another (Whitty, Rowe and Aggleton, 1994a and b). Research questions whether skills can be transferred between school and work places (Lave, 1988; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Stanton and Bailey, 2005; Nuffield, 2006, 2007, 2008a and b). The Nuffield Foundation Review of the 14-19 Education and Training has expressed serious doubts about the quality and relevance of the learning experience for low achieving young people following vocational courses (Nuffield, 2008a). Early research suggests that “vocational” aspects of vocational courses get diluted in schools due to lack of resources and expertise (Stanton and Bailey, 2005; Nuffield, 2007, 2008a and b). It is costly to reproduce work place scenarios in schools. There is a danger that vocational courses will merely inculcate ‘generic’ skills that neither employers nor students value (Bourne, 2000).

Rhetoric about generic skills as transferable commodities creates a fiction that learning can be disembodied and disconnected from persons, bodies and communities of practice. Bernstein (1990, 2001) has predicted that the focus on ‘generic’ skills as transferable commodities will have the effect of removing the person from the process of knowing. Bourne points out that a shift to ‘life-long learning’ could replace productive work for lower class boys who will be expected to substitute training for work (Bourne, 2000, p42). One way out is to develop pedagogic practices that are distinctly different to academic pedagogies and the first requirement is to recognise the embodied element of skills learning (McWilliam, 1995, cited in Bourne, 2000, p43). There is a need to make visible the full range of practices that are required for learning to take place. Learning requires work of the body, mind and head even if the balance is differently organised according to curricular subject. For example, training in the scientific method requires learning to ‘look’ at phenomena in new ways. This practice requires training the eye, the body and the mind.

7.0 Future scenarios of schooling

In the following future scenarios I have taken account of changing knowledge forms, demographic shifts, an increasingly diverse range of curricular forms, pedagogic modalities and changes in family structures. I am assuming that scarcity will replace plenty.

Key drivers

• As the gap between the rich and poor increases, so social differentiation will increase
• As family structures become more complex and more class embedded due to differential fertility rates between groups, children will have very different childhood experiences
• Changes in knowledge structure and availability based on the information revolution will change the role of universities as the primary repositories of knowledge and a plurality of knowledge creating spaces will burgeon. However, knowledge hierarchies will be perpetuated and access to high status knowledge and rich pedagogic experiences will continue to reflect historical patterns that reflect social class and gender divisions
• The economy will be characterised in terms of scarcity rather than abundance which will make it increasingly difficult to fund high quality education for all students.

Given the long historical legacies attached to forms of knowledge outlined in section 2.0, I have assumed that some aspects of schooling will not change’ for example, high status knowledge will remain text and discourse based rather than virtual, access to elite universities will remain restricted ensuing that the academic curriculum will not become skills-based, and the need for face to face human interaction in learning will not be replaced by virtual pedagogies in academic curricula. A series of hierarchies will endure between elite and low status forms of knowledge that can be traced to deep historical legacies. For example, access to high and low status forms of knowledge will continue to reflect class and gender patterns.

Scenario 1

This scenario reflects increasing diversification in times of scarcity. A decrease in young people by 2020 will require fewer schools making the possibilities of providing a diverse range of schools in a locale unlikely. The broad range of subjects on offer in secondary schools will settle into three broad streams reflecting the old tripartite education system. An elite academic curriculum will be available to a minority, a mixed academic and technically oriented curriculum will be available for the majority and a vocational and skills based curriculum will be available to the remaining group. However, scarce resources will ensure that the academic curriculum will remain traditional with the development of relatively few virtual pedagogic tools. The vocational curriculum will not develop pedagogies to teach trades and crafts authentically. Instead there will be an increasing reliance on virtual pedagogic tools to drill students in basic literacy and numeracy skills. Schools remain relatively insulated from the economic market. Elite students continue to be taught to think, the majority will receive a broad and balanced curriculum as outlined in the National Curriculum 1988 Act, and the third group will receive a watered down version of vocational education focussing on basic literacy and numeracy skills.

Scenario 2

In a time of scarcity this educational scenario predicts increasing social disintegration. There will be a move towards a skills based curriculum. Disciplinary subject boundaries become blurred as the curriculum becomes defined in terms of skills and competencies. However, even although academic subject curricular documents will use rhetoric of skills and competencies they will continue to be taught as subject content aimed at teaching subject principles in relatively traditional ways. This conservation of a traditional academic curriculum will be driven by entrance requirements for elite universities. Even students following academic curricula will be required to take a minimal number of technical or vocational courses and there will be a rise in uptake of ICT-related and business management courses especially by boys. The majority of students will follow a mixed skills and competency led curriculum. This second group will become the knowledge workers in skilled jobs. The inherent conservatism within school cultures (see section 2.0) and scarce resources will ensure that the potential for creative virtual pedagogies will not develop rapidly. Exceptions to this will be schools close to relatively new university departments of education in which virtual pedagogic technologies will develop, led by the US and the Pacific Ring countries. Support from families in terms of paid outside school tuition, access to, and encouragement to be creative with, web based 2.00 technologies in the home will increase. However, this kind of ‘top-up’ support from families will be available to children with relatively high SES. Students with relative stable home environments will allow the second group to supplement school educational provision. There will be an increasing uptake in subjects related to new media and virtual technologies with students aspiring to jobs in creative industries. The third group will have a different experience of schooling.

Due to scarcity, declining roles and the shrinkage in the number of secondary schools, strong skills based vocational education will not develop in secondary schools and increasingly this third group will move between FE colleges and schools. These groups will spend less time in traditional school classrooms requiring increasing forms of surveillance, tracking and recording. New forms of assessment will be developed for the third group. There will be a growing group of students with low SES who will not receive top-up provision and who will become increasingly dependent on state education provision. However, schools will not invest in educational provision for groups with low SES due to the pressure to achieve good examination results. Schools will continue to focus extra support on students who they judge to be on the borderline between grades ‘D’ and ‘C’. Groups with low SES will continue to be those most excluded from school and they will continue to resist educational practices that they perceive to be ‘irrelevant’ to their lives and futures. Due to changes in family structures, this group will experience increasingly nomadic lifestyles exacerbated by spreading curriculum across sites. Coupled with the increase in use of technologies for pedagogic purposes this group will experience less human interaction in learning processes. Less social solidarity will be experienced in homes and in schools leading to increasing social alienation. This will exacerbate a rise in alliance to sub-cultures and outlaw groups as young people search to find a sense of belonging. They will not access web 2.0 technologies creatively and instead will become the ‘victims’ of increased use of ICT technology to deliver basic skills practice and to control and monitor movement. Industry and the private sector will take increasing control of education for traditional working class groups as schools fail to ‘engage’ them in learning. The rise of the role of the learning mentor will lead to increased surveillance on individual learning pathways. Many students will slip though the surveillance nets developed by schools and social services and will enter sub-cultures and unofficial local economies. If they live in areas of high unemployment, they will increasingly live outside official institutions, work places and community structures. Unlike the other two groups they will remain tied to their localities, travel less widely and become reliant on locally available resources.

This scenario depicts a widening of the gap between social groups, in which young people will increasingly lead parallel lives, with hugely different access to symbolic, human and educational resources. This will lead to a small elite upper class gaining access to the few professional jobs, majority middle groups entering a diverse range of jobs in new industries (regions in Bernstein’s typology) and an underclass that will have experienced a very different educational world to the other two groups. Ostensibly the (school) curriculum embraces the concerns of industrialists by foregrounding skills and competencies. Employers such as MacDonalds will take on the role of educating the third group. Therefore control over education of the traditional working class group will move away from schools and universities towards employers and the private sector.

Scenario 3 – A possible way forward?

A commitment to social justice drives this educational scenario. Scarcity of energy, clean water and non-contaminated food will drive this moral imperative. This scenario is unlikely to come about by 2020 but may come about by 2050. Fears about global environmental sustainability introduce a new moral imperative in schools making a break with traditional religious moralities and post-modern secular relativism. A recognition of locale-global connectivity and the interconnections between economic systems ushers in a realisation that national citizenry has given way to global citizenry. It will become apparent that a skills and competency based curricula cannot fulfil the educational aims of teaching citizens to deal with complex social and political problems. It will be recognised that competencies reflect neo-liberal philosophies that over-emphasise the individual and neglect the social and community contexts on which societies depends. Attempts to mine the inner potential of the person usually referred to as ‘gifts and talents’ ignore the socially embedded nature of learning. A few schools will adopt this philosophic approach before 2050 forging a new curriculum although these schools will remain in the minority and are more likely to be primary rather than secondary schools. Curricula will foreground thinking and will not address the concerns of industrialists but of environmentalism and global politics. Thematic and project work will blur disciplinary subject boundaries. The principles of philosophical enquiry and new forms of artistic creativity will underpin school activities. This process-based approach to learning will be reminiscent of previous child centred approaches to learning. Divisions between social groups will become less apparent, as learning will be based on bridging students’ local indigenous knowledge and culture with a curriculum based on ‘thinking’ principles. This type of curriculum will only become apparent in secondary schools if the principles that underlie its philosophy are adopted in the entry requirements of elite universities. Therefore a radical change to our understanding of teaching and learning will have to be led by HE. Schools will become well insulated from the immediate concerns of the market yet not from long term social needs. Creating the knowledge workers of the future can best be achieved by increasing, rather than decreasing the boundary between schools and work. Allowing schools to operate according to different principles to those of the economic marked allows them to do a fundamentally different job, that is, to teach thinking skills before applying them to the world. Students need time to develop critical thinking skills required to approach complex social, moral and political problems. Ironically this kind of curriculum would nurture the critical, creative and innovative thinking skills required for workers in the new knowledge economy. Returning to some of the educational ideals within the Greek curriculum might not be such a bad idea.

Footnotes

Note1 The typology of forms of knowledge was compiled with reference to Bernstein’s 1990 paper The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse (see refs), from Bernstein’s chapter in the Greek curriculum, 1996 chapter 4 ‘Thoughts on the Trivium and Quadrivium: The Divorce of Knowledge from the Knower’ and from Tresilian, N. (2008) After Capitalism, Special Issue 21^st Society, Journal of the Academy of Social Science 3 (2) 201-211.

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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.

There are two deeply entwined themes at the heart of this essay. First is the question of how the ‘geo-social’ relationships of learners, homes, communities, non-formal learning spaces, regions, schools, nations and the globalised economy may or may not change to offer different kinds of learning processes, experiences and activities. The essential argument here is to explore how different kinds of social relations, especially those which are located in reconfigured and/or virtual spatial relationships create different kinds of possibilities for learning. But there is also a second reflexive and more theoretical theme at work in the construction of the idea of sites and contexts for learning. It is only really socio-cultural understanding of the transactions involved in learning which place a premium on, and an interest in, sites and contexts for learning. From this point of view we need to explore how ideas about how we learn are bound up in our attempts to conceptualise the role of space and place within the learning process.

Some of the key ideas relating to the first theme were laid out in the Beyond Current Horizons challenge by Gill Valentine. Valentine identified three important trends which have underpinned recent policy interest in learning (especially in relationship to ICT). These include:

• The Changing Relationship Between the Spaces of School, Home and Community
• The Future of the School as a Physical Offline Space
• What New Sites of Learning are Emerging?

The other paper in this series by Andrew Harrison asked a series of questions within these frames, probing in more detail the relationships between the physical (and virtual) institutions of schooling as the place for learning and learning in other sites.

The essay is organised into four parts. The heart of the essay, Section 3, will take up these challenges, exploring in more detail the literature which is concerned with analysing learning from a spatial perspective. Quite what the spatial means and/or adds to our understanding of learning will, of course, form a key part this section. And whilst the challenges described above are concerned mainly with home and school and, to an extent, community (in this context primarily considered in terms of locality rather than affinity grouping), I will additionally attempt to look at larger scales (region, nation and the global) considering a series of ‘locations’ which may act as determinants on learning. Each part of this section concludes with an explicit consideration of how each ’space’ might play out in future scenarios.

The final part of the essay will then consider the implications of how this analytic frame (derived, as I have said, from socio-cultural formulations of learning) may or may not limit our ability to consider the meaning and function of context in learning in the future. However this essay begins by considering the role of context and site in learning in general (Section 1) before examining theories of formal and informal learning in Section 2, which is the most common way in which learning across different contexts is usually understood.

1. Sites, spaces and contexts: stories about learning

As is appropriate for an essay attempting to imagine possible futures, I want to begin by considering one of the most powerful narratives about education from the past, namely Thomas Hardy’s novel, Jude the Obscure. First published in 1895, it tells the story of a young rural child desperate to learn and study but excluded from university – symbolised by the distant spires of Oxford – by class and poverty. The novel makes a great case for the virtues of informal learning, in what we might call, different sites, and describes the early years of Jude hunched over books, reading surreptitiously and subversively as he delivers milk, for example.

The book exemplifies some key themes for our purposes and implicitly sets up a contrast between out-of-school learning as characterised over a hundred years ago and contemporary processes. Jude is a good example of a motivated, engaged learner. He learns outside formal schooling structures and systems (albeit obviously aping them at a deeper level, as shown in descriptions of him learning bits of the classics he does not ‘understand’). If Jude described a young boy playing his PSP under a desk we would, I suggest, categorise it as a subversive, transformative experience – which is what Hardy does. Indeed, the way Jude’s learning mimics forms of inclusion (reading the classics exemplifies the way that the possession of knowledge creates status, for example) is also a very contemporary educational concern. Yet, paradoxically, learning for Jude only reinforces his class-based exclusion just as it appears to open doors for him, and in the narrative of this novel such aspirations lead to tragic consequences. Although Jude is a fiction, studies of working class auto-didacticism unearthed by Jonathan Rose, place his existence and these principles in very solid historical fact (Rose, 2001).

Although not examined as such, spaces of learning like the milk cart and above all, the dreaming spires of Oxford, are also important. On the one hand learning only takes place in the space of the mind and so (like the milk cart) context is unimportant: it’s what happens cognitively that counts. On the other hand, Oxford, its architecture and colleges, is a profoundly embodied and material place from which Jude is physically excluded. It is difficult to separate Oxford from what Bourdieu, writing years later, would call its ’symbolic power’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990).

These twin poles of context (as both immaterial and embodying power) have been modified by more recent theory and again it is primarily through narrative that we can apprehend the deeper processes at work. In one of the classic studies of ’situated learning’, Lave and Wenger (1991) describe how Vai and Gola tailors in Liberia learn through apprenticeship. Rather than offering an account of learning as a disembodied cognitive process, they describe learning as a profoundly social process where it is indeed the materiality of interpersonal, contextual and linguistic interactions which provide the engine for learning. Building on notions of affordance offered by physical, social, linguistic and semiotic resources (Wertsch, 1997), these scholars represent a tradition which pays attention to context as the preeminent influence on learning. Shirley Brice Heath’s classic socio-linguistic ethnographic study of language acquisition and use in two different communities in the US is another well known narrative which shows how language learning is integrally related to context and is produced over time through social interactions and reflection (Brice Heath, 1983). Whilst Brice Heath may acknowledge the kinds of symbolic power represented in Jude, for her, as with the scholars of situated learning, context is all.

Clearly, as can already be seen, the notion of learning, as used across these narratives is not a uniform or monolithic concept. Indeed, whether there is a meta-process of learning (as a singular process) as opposed to the kinds of learning (as plural processes) that takes place across different contexts is open to debate. In this essay it is already two-faced. Learning looks to describe processes for people and at the same time represents a set of values and a broader social function. This inherent duality will continue to bedevil discussion in generalised speculation about the future, and certainly its fundamental ambiguity underwrites my next story.

The next ‘fable’ comes from a prominent American tradition deriving from a mix of constructivist epistemology and utopian idealism. Seymour Papert’s call to arms argues that if we compare a contemporary classroom and a hospital with those in existence a century earlier, the fundamental elements of a schoolroom are much the same as they were (both in terms of process and transactions as well as curriculum content) whereas, he argues, a modern hospital is virtually unrecognisable from its historic counterpart (Papert, 1993). This is a critique of learning theory as much as it is of schooling. The main response to this kind of challenge has been to proffer technological solutions to the perceived immutability of the classroom and indeed the wider role of schools. A recent report by the National Science Foundation offers this vision (NSF, 2008):

Imagine a high school student in the year 2015. She has grown up in a world where learning is as accessible through technologies at home as it is in the classroom, and digital content is as real to her as paper, lab equipment, or textbooks. At school, she and her classmates engage in creative problem-solving activities by manipulating simulations in a virtual laboratory or by downloading and analyzing visualizations of real-time data from remote sensors. Away from the classroom, she has seamless access to school materials and homework assignments using inexpensive mobile technologies. She continues to collaborate with her classmates in virtual environments that allow not only social interaction with each other but also rich connections with a wealth of supplementary content. Her teacher can track her progress over the course of a lesson plan and compare her performance across a lifelong “digital portfolio,” making note of areas that need additional attention through personalized assignments and alerting parents to specific concerns. What makes this possible is cyberlearning, the use of networked computing and communications technologies to support learning. Cyberlearning has the potential to transform education throughout a lifetime, enabling customized interaction with diverse learning materials on any topic – from anthropology to biochemistry to civil engineering to zoology. Learning does not stop with K-12 or higher education; cyberlearning supports continuous education at any age, space, beyond the classroom and throughout a lifetime (p1).

Here the learning contexts are material but assumed to be kind of semi-transparent, unlike the social contexts in Lave and Wenger or Brice Heath. The NSF vision takes up Papert’s vision and offers a kind of distributed, networked institution. The same power relations represented by Jude’s Oxford remain, but the question of symbolic power has been circumvented by offering a more mellow and accessible world. Learning is here is fun (not a value that came into Jude), not very social in an interpersonal sense although clearly relying on a range of affordances and contextual cues. It is active and interactive and takes place in a continuous present (again in contrast to notions of ossification implicit in the city of Oxford).

Whilst an extreme psychological version of learning may imagine a mind in isolation, it is true to say that most theories of mind underpinning ideas about learning, especially those drawing on forms of ‘new learning ‘ (Kalantzis and Cope, 2008) now conceptualise social context as part of the learning process. However, like the NSF example above, sometimes that context is assumed to be what I called ’semi-transparent’; that is, a neutral unobtrusive medium through which the learning can take place. On the other hand the theorists of situated learning suggest that meaning is made in context and that forms of behaviour, attitude, and indeed all the other affective dimensions of learning, are constructed by specific social circumstances. In other words, learning isn’t just what happens in the head but is bound up with a host of other dispositions, attributes and orientations. Indeed current research is especially interested in how learning is bound up with deep questions of identity and identity formation (Lemke, 2008; Pollard and Filer, 1999). Indeed Wortham talks about how there is an approach to learning which is essentially ontological, in that it shows how learning is inseparable from what it mean ‘to be’ as a person and the identity-making process (Wortham, 2005, Chapter 3).

This more whole-person approach to learning raises hard questions about the role of context. Is this a new way of revisiting traditional concerns about who has access or how ‘environment’ affects learning? Or more conceptually, how does learning transfer occur if context is so influential? Does the contemporary approach to the situated nature of learning offer portability or fixedness? Much contemporary educational discourse focuses on notions of competence and skill rather learning as a way of drawing attention to performative, non-contextually bound capabilities but again this avoids ideas of abstract potentials that can be realised in different situations. In general, learning theory needs to remain unfettered as it skates between these two poles.

A final introductory observation needs to be made. All the discussion about context, place and site is premised on the use of spatial metaphors. This vocabulary derives from a recent tendency to add the spatial dimension to the historical and the social in what Soja calls a ‘trialectic’ understanding of social phenomena (Soja, 1996). The effect of this new kind of social geography has been influential in connecting educational analysis with socio-economic structures. This helps us understand learning at the micro level (individuals in their social contexts) with macro questions about broader and deeper context (national and global economy) in ways that aren’t just about differences in scale, but suggest deep patterns of interconnectedness (Leander and Sheehy, 2004). I shall return to this issue in the final section.

In summary, I have used snapshots of educational moments/writing as a way of trying to disentangle the different ways in which context has been used as a way of offering insight into learning. I have suggested that:

• We need to reconcile approaches to learning which focus on its social function in concert with how it works at the level of individual process
• That there are contradictory notions of the ‘material’ and ‘transparent’ nature of context within common understandings of what learning is
• That context is social in the sense of the interpersonal and the affective as well as the semiotic and networked
• That learning cannot be divorced from identity (or identities) as an ‘ultimate’ context even though this raises questions about transfer of learning across contexts.

2. Formal/informal/non-formal: epistemologies and knowledge-economies

This section describes some of the current thinking underpinning the idea that learning takes place in and across sites. In particular, I suggest that the notion of informal learning has gained greater currency in recent years as a way of describing some of the perceived changes in where and how people learn (Sefton-Green, 2008). It thus offers a way of conceptualising learning within and across different and/or new sites and learning contexts. This frame is, I would argue, an epistemological one in that it suggests different ways of knowing as much as it suggests that learning may be taking place in alternative and complementary time-spaces. However, this approach also raises questions of political economy inasmuch as ideas of informal knowledge and other ways of knowing are bound up with the changing economic role of knowledge(s) in different domains.

Although there are no hard and fast definitions of what formal, informal and non-formal education might mean, and the terms are often used interchangeably, it is useful to distinguish between school systems (formal structures supported and developed by the State), learning taking place as determined by the learner (informally), and the organised but non-formal sites of education. See also discussion in Sefton-Green, 2004; Bekerman et al, 2005.

Although these terms are not new they have been used with increasing frequency to describe the changing locations for learning and as such are central to the hypothesis behind this challenge. Yet, the interest in informal learning predates the kinds of structural re-organisation of education we are concerned with. Scribner and Cole started from the assumption that most research on learning derived from non-socio-cultural approaches looking at school-based systems of learning and argued that if we just accept the fact that the social organisation of learning differs from site to site, then learning occurring in the non-formal domain is crucially important (Scribner and Cole, 1973, p553).

This approach opened the door to a huge range of research of which language learning and literacy acquisition are the most prominent examples (Baynham, 2004). Implicitly, this work explored the complexity, the structured nature and the embedded social nature of informal learning, although learning language or literacy was the object of this study rather than the notion of informal learning in its own right. The more ethnographic and anthropological accounts of literacy and language acquisition also inscribed the study of informal learning as, in some ways, an adventure into the unknown.

Once it had become accepted that informal learning could be theorised in this way, that it offered a legitimate object for study, the key (and oft repeated question) becomes how we distinguish between formal and informal learning. Scribner and Cole focused on the social organisation of knowledge. In doing so, they also touch on the idea (followed up by later scholars) that debates about the nature of learning via this informal route is indistinguishable from the politics of education.

Because schools occupy such a central role in the organisation, transmission, and regulation of knowledge and accepted forms of pedagogy it is obvious that a discussion about informal learning becomes more than simply a disinterested account of socio-cultural (or even cognitive) processes. The critique of schooling as social reproduction, the analysis of the status of knowledge developed by Bernstein (1990) and the power of pedagogy developed by Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) are all examples of how discussion about the nature of formal learning becomes a discussion about power in society. In other words, socio-cultural discussion cannot separate claims for the impact and significance of school (and out-of-school) learning from notions of how what gets legitimated in, for example, classroom settings, and individuals are subjected to, identify with, and ‘behave’ according to its process: this affects the nature of the claims that can be, or are made for informal learning.

Using informal and non-formal education as a way of exploring the politics of education partly helps us deconstruct the relationship between schooling and learning, showing, as we shall see below, how assumptions about the organisation of the project of mass education underpin versions of how learning works. However, it also helps us rethink the different roles and power of knowledge(s). In the NSF future vision for learning quoted above, the new technologies are primarily imagined as a way of accessing the same kind of knowledge provided by traditional academic disciplines but at different times or places. There is now an established body of study which is interested in how new kinds of learning (experienced informally and non-formally) is in itself developing new kinds of knowledge-communities. Here, studies of blogging are allegedly changing the nature of participation in the body politic (Shirky, 2008; Palfrey and Gasser, 2008) or scholars of computer games show how swathes of games literacy and in-game knowledge are learnt online (Gee, 2004: Shaffer, 2005). Although there is debate about how far, how deep and how meaningful these new kinds of knowledge are, it remains a key tenet of the shift towards valuing informal and non-formal education that other kinds of authority, other types of knowledge and other kinds of scholarly apparatus have currency and value.

There is now substantial literature about informal learning (eg Bekerman et al, 2005) and much of it does try to distinguish the unique and distinguishing characteristics of informal learning as a distinct mode; although it is also true that many writers do not, at the end of the day, generally hold onto extremely hard and fast distinctions between informal and formal learning, or between modes of informal learning and learning in general. In general, much of the recent study of informal learning derives from workplace studies and/or cultural anthropology and does not focus on young people. Taking these caveats into consideration, the literature on informal learning can be broken down along the following key axes (see Colley et al, (2003) for an extended and more detailed taxonomy):

1. Location. Where the learning takes place – how and if context is a determinant of processes

2. Processes. How the learning is organised, whether there are forms of accreditation and assessment: what kind of style or pedagogic relationship is used. How the learning is supported and whether it is collective, collaborative or individual

3. Purposes. Why the learning occurs, in whose interests?

4. Content. Whether the knowledge has disciplinary provenance, how it is applied theoretically and in practice.

In very general terms these elements underpin all attempts to characterise and describe formal and informal learning. The central role of location within this paradigm underpins the discussion in the following section which explores different spaces and the different dimensions of location.

3. Unbundling learning: homes, schools, communities, nation states and the global.

This section draws on the notion of unbundling as described by urban geographers. Graham and Marvin explain the processes by which discrete services within the urban environment (eg sewage, roads, gas, electricity, etc) all of which used to be delivered by a central urban authority have become increasingly unbundled as part of the process of privatisation and marketisation (Graham and Marvin, 2001). In some respects I suggest here that the idea of learning (as imagined by Jude, for example), which used to be understood as a unified and unitary process through the idea of schooling, is now fragmented and subject to a range of market pressures. This is not just the same thing as analysing the marketisation of schooling (see, for example, Kenway and Bullen (2001) and Ball (2008)) because we are interested in how the concept of learning (as opposed to just its practices) may have become unbundled as much through the idea of informal learning as through changing modes or locations of delivery. At the same time the idea of unbundling draws attention to geo-social contexts. Accordingly, the structure of this section begins locally (in the home) and then moves progressively outwards through schools, communities, regions, nation states and ultimately, via virtual technologies, to considering learning on a global scale.

In essence this section of the essay suggests that recent thinking about learning has investigated, and at times even constituted, this process of unbundling: and indeed argued that different delivery mechanisms now available in the home or virtually have contributed to an assault on schooling as the previous monopoly supplier of education. If this hypothesis is correct, whether and how the processes of unbundling can be further developed, and if so, whether this implies a further scaling across different levels (away from the narrow concerns with the individual in the home to wider ideas of the breakdown of schooling as a national project), will be key questions for the future of education. Here older humanist visions of de-schooling society (Illich, 1995) connect with neo-liberal visions of an expanding and fragmenting market as well as with cutting edge theorists of cognition and understanding.

Each part of this section contains a paragraph explicitly teasing out implications for future scenarios. The key principle I have applied is not how change will influence future models of education but more what will need to have changed in socio-economic terms to facilitate structural changes in education organisation and practice.

3.1 The role of the Home in Learning

On one level the home has always been a key site for education research and it is not appropriate to reprise all of these interests here in great detail. Whether it is exploring the impact of social class and background on educational achievement through the provision of social or cultural capital, or studies of language acquisition, or indeed the roles that parents play in developing and supporting learning with their child, it is clear that the home is always going to be a differentiated key determinant on people’s learning.

However in recent years these traditional concerns have taken on a new slant in two interrelated ways. First, the home is key site for the consumption and use of digital technologies, and from a range of perspectives, it thus enters into an educational field. Secondly, and of course in conjunction with this approach, the home has now become a key site for the marketisation of education and this too positions it within a larger socio-economic geography of learning.

Given that underpinning both of these concerns are long-standing issues relating to the role of social and/or cultural capital it is inconceivable that these issues of differential access, connectivity (social and technological) and participation will not play a key role in future models of education and learning.

The emerging and changing space of the ‘digital bedroom’ (Livingstone, 2002) is both a site for the consumption of edutainment media (Buckingham and Scanlon, 2002) and a new space for media culture. Here computer games and participation in online virtual communities seem to be creating a host of new ways of learning, being and knowing that challenge the epistemological conventions of mass schooling (Gee, 2004; Shaffer, 2005). These challenges are further developed by scholars analysing how the different ways of being young (as both child and youth) are changed by these new modes of behaviour (Buckingham, 2000): and especially analysing when these too come into conflict with what it means to be a traditional school student. Others suggest that this is re-negotiated in re-configured school/student relationships: see the collection by Knobel, Lankshear and Bigum, 2007.

At the same time as these cultural analyses of learning in the home have suggested important ruptures in educational relationships, there has been a flood of initiatives to turn the home into a new site for conventional education. Building on models of social capital, studies have shown how spending on educational opportunities via hardware and software is now an important part of how education has leaked beyond school boundaries and made the home a key site for complementary, and remedial intervention (Nixon, 1998). Of course this shift has obvious policy implications in terms of the equitable distribution of resources and challenging traditional ways in which education is imagined as a way of equalising opportunity.

Both the culturalist-ontological approach and the social/cultural capital analysis build on deeper concerns about how learning works and what difference education makes. These questions will remain irrespective of how deep critics of these developing trends maintain the level of change actually is.

3.3.1 Future Scenarios

The home is going to continue to occupy a key place in the unequal distribution of social capital which determines educational success. Families will continue to seek educational advantage for their children. If the State finds it acceptable to change the idea of mass schooling as an equalisation/baseline experience then the home will become even more important as a site for complementary, supplementary and remedial education. Such opportunities will continue to be exploited by the private sector. Homes may even become a site for obtaining credentials but income disparities will set significant political challenges for cohesion and fairness.

At the same time attention to quality of learning in the home will continue to act as an educational alternative leading to a constant struggle with formal knowledge practices. These tensions will never become resolved with the formal curriculum because they remain necessarily positional markers of class differentiation: and until differentiation stops being a primary goal of the education system, the politics of maintaining unequal differences will continue to seek forms of legitimation.

3.2 Re-distributing the School

The NSF vision described in Section 1 of learning science in a number of off-site locations and yet in a more ‘authentic’ set of learning relationships than those traditionally available in conventional schooling exemplifies our second key unbundled location. Whereas the home offers itself as an alternative (complement or remediation), ideas of opened-up schools working in a networked or distributed fashion is also a serious way of imagining different ideas of learning contexts and locations.

The central vision of networked schooling essentially unpicks a series of key ideas about the project of mass schooling. It is founded on the principle that the kinds of place-based resources (especially based on books) which defined the economics of schooling can now be more effectively and efficiently met by re-distributing the functions of schooling across other kinds of places and in other time frames as a way of ‘networking’ learning itself.

Intellectually, many of these ideas derive from attention to the metaphor of the network underpinning economic analyses in the 1990s (see Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007) and studies of workplace based learning which showed how attention to learning within organisations could work as effectively as any notion of command and control or hierarchy (Brown and Duguid, 2000). In one sense throwing the onus back onto the learner makes them the fixed constant moving through differing experiences and opportunities. This then creates challenges for communication, transparency, regulation, accountability and power (amongst others) according to one attempt to theorise these new forms of social organisation emerging out of these concerns (McCarthy, Miller, and Skidmore, 2004). In Education in the UK, these concerns have influenced two recent policy initiatives: Personalisation (Leadbeater, 2004), and Building Schools for the Future (BSF).

With respect to ‘Personalisation’, Hargreaves has argued that a range of innovations can stem from framing education in a more personalised way, exploring both its effect on teachers creating learning communities, stakeholder interest in participation as well as increased opportunities for challenging, varied and appropriate learning customised for individuals. (Hargreaves, 2003) Much of this thinking has additionally informed work around BSF as very particular way of concretising theory. In their visions for future versions of schooling – built around new types of school – publications like What If? (Rudd et al, 2006) – draw on wider understanding of extended and community schools (see, for example, Craig, Huber and Lownsborough, 2004) within a policy framework inspired by the joined-up-ness’ of Every Child Matters, to produce aspirational models of distributed learning.

Here an attention to principles behind educational experiments leads to more differentiated models of schools, with distinct social functions, as workplaces, community hubs and even as local markets. The institutional compromise which characterises how schools work in practice subject to the necessary normative power of standardisation cannot be found in such exercises. It is thus noticeable that the research literature describing ‘re-distributed’ schools ‘ is not as empirical or as theoretically sophisticated as that referred to in the section above, as to an extent, the literature performs an advocacy rather than a descriptive function. Accounts of innovative practice are, to an extent un-tempered with even medium term evaluations of impact, and certainly there are no large scale, widely accepted evaluations of any such changes around for use as change-models.

Studies of innovative school re-organisation are more cautious about examples in practice of the kind of visions outlined in the literature discussed here. This is not to say that re-distributed schools are not possible but that they require a significant change of emphasis across many dimensions, much more than just buildings or curriculum (as suggested by BSF) and that the English record of structural innovation is perhaps more patchy than some would wish. However, the principle of changing where, how and when students learn beyond conventional schooling is a fixed trope in futures thinking around the role of context in the educational imagination.

3.2.1 Future Scenarios

In the immediate future (up to 10 years) it is plausible to imagine schools partially redistributing learning, unbundling curriculum and diversifying pedagogic strategies but this may remain the preserve of innovative practice unless resources are made available to make such an offer open to all. Such changes will place immense stress on developing an appropriate workforce, and there is no evidence that the UK is capable of investing in this at present. If the delivery of education becomes increasingly stratified, it is entirely conceivable that forms of accreditation and assessment will move into a highly controlled, regulated but not centrally delivered model of education.

3.3 The Learning Community and (City) Region

Recent innovation studies have paid much attention to the role of the city region as a driver of economic growth (Athey et al, 2007) and have both implicitly and explicitly explored how such city regions work in relationship with and as part of local education providers (Gustavsen, Nyhan and Ennls, 2007). Traditionally Higher Education has been researched as playing a lead role in driving productivity at regional level and supplying labour for local markets. The European Union is especially focused on policy interventions at this scale. At the same time, learning has been explored at a community level, in ‘units’ larger than a school, but nevertheless explored as constitutive of, and in response to, the social construct of a local community. Studies like Local Literacies (Barton and Hamilton, 1998) or Making Modern Lives (McLeod and Yates, 2006), as well as the youth-centred work of Glynda Hull in San Francisco, have looked at learning and education as framed by routes and trajectories within the community. In the US the work of Luis Moll and colleagues on ‘funds of knowledge’, as a way of characterising ways of thinking, literacy events, language use and social practices in Mexican Latino communities (Gonzalez, Moll, and Amanti, 2005) has been influential. Such theories and professional development programmes explore the cultural knowledges and practices of minority communities in collision with the ‘mainstream’. They look to legitimate other ways of knowing and being for teachers and schools. Taken together this economic focus on the city region, and a social-anthropological attention to learning as a feature of community, suggests a meso level type of context.

Studies of learning at this level like Schooling the Rustbelt Kids (Thomson, 2003) offering a socio-economic history of the region in South Australia or even those studies drawing on a sociology of youth like the study of education-to-training routes in parts of London (Ball, Maguire and Macrae, 2000) often focus on the effects of schooling on life-chances: and so more properly use the second face of how learning is used in the this essay – looking at its role in society more generally, than as an ‘intra-personal’ process.

I suggest that this vast literature field belongs in this essay because these studies and this approach draw attention to the immediate social context in which learning takes place. They explore what difference learning makes to the life-chances of learners and shows how aspirations, opportunities as well as academic processes are constructed by these local political and economic determinants.

The important issue of what Phil Cohen called ‘really useful knowledge’ (Cohen, 1990), that is the kind of tactical-learning that might make a difference to what you do or become, is best articulated in studies at this level. The literature points to real limits, constraints and serendipities in people’s life courses. It also underscores the economic purpose of learning and how such determinants affect how learners understand the value of knowledge and learning-to-learn and add thus a depth to the kinds of approaches we have encountered so far. The more ethnographic research projects explore the formation of social identities at this level and this too offers an important corrective to any perspective that can’t see beyond the close-up. Any consideration of a generalised unbundled educational future has to acknowledge the reality of local labour markets and community knowledge as very real constraints on the impact of learning at this level. In particular simply paying attention to changes in technology or delivery process ignores this crucial determinant.

3.3.1 Future Scenarios

The key issues here are in what ways education focuses explicitly on its economic purpose in preparing for labour markets. The more this function predominates, the more local/regional needs will determine outcomes. Changing macro-political arrangements within England and the EU may assist in this process of regionalising the purpose of schooling: although this raises the prospect of an internationalised elite. At the same time increasing movement of peoples and the development of forms of cosmopolitan citizenship (Beck, 2006) may both homogenise and balkanize diversity of communities. These trajectories are opaque. The increase of large global corporations as dominant employers in certain regions will focus attention on the need for schools to meet local supply needs.

3.4 Nation States, the Global, and the role of ICT in unbundling

At present, education is conceived of as a national project. Most systematic investment in education is at the level of the Nation State. However, a key dimension of neo-liberal globalisation is that previous boundaries belonging to the nation are now opened to multi-nationals and different kinds of international flexibility. At present the curriculum and accreditation/qualifications are the remit of the Nation State and the governance of education is considered a question of national policy. In an unbundled globalised world, these assumptions may not hold true.

Not only might issues of curriculum context be supra-national but qualifications and even the market value of accreditation may look very different as individuals feel free to purchase their education beyond their immediate locale. The emerging trends of Cisco and Microsoft industry standard qualifications point to a level of a marketised supra-national curriculum authority. This perspective is at the heart of popular studies of globalisation like The World is Flat (Friedman, 2006). Although more geared towards higher education than schools, studies exploring learning at supra-national levels are frequently motivated by questions of economic competitiveness, with the world economy and employment in transnational companies the object of interventions. However, with the exception of studies of the English language, and possibly ongoing research into the use and take up of the International Baccalaureate, we tend to think of education being a national concern when clearly this isn’t an entirely tenable proposition.

There would be thus appear to be three dimensions to this analytic frame. The first, as outlined above, considers questions about governance, authority, and structural organisation; the second explores the ways in which learners can position themselves within the global flow as consumer-citizens beyond national boundaries; and the third investigates the growth of transnational forms of co-operation of which the open education (and open source movements) are the most evident. It is clear here that in analytic terms we are dealing with both questions of political authority and also the social effect of ICT, as clearly it is only through the use of such technologies that we might achieve the sort of unbundling that might enable this scenario.

There are now many formal and informal mechanisms by which learners position themselves in relation to the wider community beyond the immediate locale. In general this gives rise to two kinds of literature. The first explores curriculum projects that develop international links where learners’ sense of self and their focus is taken beyond usual boundaries: see, for example, www.chicam.org. The second explores learning in online and virtual communities, especially those constructed though game play, to examine how identity, co-operation, and simulation develop knowledge and capabilities: see for example the scoping of participatory culture in Henry Jenkins ‘White Paper’ (Jenkins et al, 2007) and the TLRP commentary on Education 2.0. In some respects the ideas behind these kinds of research link with some of the aspirations of the culturalist approaches I outlined in Section 3.1 above, as together they all suggest ways in which the learner is positioned differently, in terms of their identity and their putative agency, than within more conventional learning frameworks. Of course, whether this trend continues and how it relates to the formal curriculum remain areas for debate and policy intervention.

Finally, we need to mention initiatives that are beginning to unbundle the conventional apparatus of national regulated education systems, including publishing and content-driven issues. John Willinsky has argued persuasively (and developed practical online tools) to develop structural interventions that reposition the peer-review journal industry (Willinsky, 2006), and the contributors to a volume on ‘Open Education’ (Iiyoshi and Kumar, 2008) suggest a host of ways where international collaboration is genuinely offering both free (or more accessible) cross-border opportunities for study, research and curriculum development – all suggesting changing forms of pedagogy. Indeed the thrust of much writing in this area is that the un-doing of time and place (part of the unbundling, as I have termed it) requires the recognition of different kinds of learners than is currently produced though national education systems, eg Green et al (2006).

3.4.1 Future Scenarios

Unbundling the Nation State will lead to the growth of cosmopolitan elites who may well learn within a globalised assessment and accreditation framework. Some of the technologies underpinning these possibilities may well develop as a mixture of public good (open source/open content) and private initiatives. This trend will lead to an explicit two-tier education system. Jonathan Zittrain has shown how technological openness is engaged in a constant struggle with legal regulatory frameworks and the growth of ‘walled’ and ‘tethered’ appliances (Zittrain, 2008). ICT in Education is in the same place. The democratic, open and generative technologies which speak to individuals, support individualised learning trajectories and create communities of interest which offer an imperfect fit with State systems of control of assessment and stratification.

3.5 Summary

The structure of this essay has perhaps rather artificially followed physical scale, moving from the home, through schools to communities, regions and then to the Nation State and ultimately the global. At each of these levels there is considerable interest in opening up, or unbundling as I have characterized it, the socio-economic limits of each context to offer learners different authority and agency over their learning. At the same time, I have suggested that this isn’t a process of unfettered expansion because I have tried to weave questions of governance and marketisation into a study of pedagogy and learning, showing how regulatory issues constitute, shape and form the identities of learners and their learning.

Given the likely continuation of this unbundling process and the policies which will address the questions of equality bound up in such trajectories, my challenge is to ask what the political response to such possibilities will be. As always, the issue is to focus on what the purpose of schooling is and let the systems follow from such principles. Whilst the role of schools may change if political settlements alter the traditional role of the Nation State, opening up schools to a range of learning processes available also opens up education to the market. If that is acceptable to a new political dispensation then unbundling will continue apace: if not, then measures will need to be taken to regulate and equalise such processes.

4. Imagining Learning as a Spatial Project: the Socio-Cultural lens

This fourth and final section of the essay tries to reflect theoretically on how our dominant paradigm of learning-socio-cultural frames – both constitutes and is constituted by the idea of space, contexts, and sites. I am suggesting that if we are trying to imagine Education and Learning in 2050, inevitably we are going to use the way we conceptualise learning processes now and there is a strong tradition in educational thinking which suggests that dominant ways of thinking about learning are themselves the product of a contemporary set of social and political arrangements rather than deriving from any deep ahistorical abstract processes. In other words, how we imagine learning is as much the result of the relationship of learning theory to practices as it could be about anything else.

If this is true then it does two things. First it asks us to reconsider the implicit values in how we think about contexts, location places and sites, in any review of their place in learning. Secondly, it raises questions about we can think about the nexus of theory, practice and political arrangements that will define education in 2050.

Kieran Egan suggests that there are, in effect, a few ‘old’ models of education which get recycled and are anyway bound up with changing historical circumstances (Egan, 1997). Robin Alexander makes a similar point about fashionable cycles of educational theory (Alexander, 2001). The key point here is that the theories which each generation uses to explain its theory of mind, as Bruner would put it (Bruner, 1996), is not absolute. When applied to the range of discussion I have tried to cover here, we might argue that notions of informal and distributed learning are discursively produced by marketisation processes rather than just offering direct ‘justifications’ of changes in sites of learning. We should also consider that descriptions of practices become unproblematically translated into prescriptions for change.

One interesting speculation for future-gazing might be to reflect on the ways in which older theories of learning are still present in current educational discourse. Egan talks about the core principles of socialisation and of ‘entry into a conversation that began long time ago’ (Egan, 1997, p14). More intriguingly might be a way of considering the kinds of ‘neo-behaviourism’, usually a relatively discredited explanation of learning, which offer a different way of understanding some of the learning identities observable across new and changing sites of education. Rather than analysing new kinds of learning behaviour (in, say, computer games, or across network play) in socio-cultural terms, where the role of context is so important, might such kinds of attitude, or approach, be as explicable due to forms of behaviourist theory? Might such learning simply be an adaptation to changing circumstances.

It is not that I would necessarily advocate this interpretation, or even support it, but I do want to suggest that our current interest in questions of context, site, location may be as much a question of theoretical fashionableness as it is a way of shedding light on any truth about learning. If this is this case we have to be careful as we approach any idea of inferring a future for education because all we are really capable of doing is extrapolating contemporary theorisations of learning. And this, I am arguing, is simply a response to our contemporary politico-social settlement.

My final observation relates to space’s corollary: time. Whilst I have focused above on the unbundling of place in response to shifts in the nature of capital resources required to support the project of mass education, it is equally true that shifts in place are also about shifts in time. Just as a central theme in Section 3 has been the unbundling of a national model of schooling by a series of more distributed and dispersed providers, so it now seems clear that when you learn is as much up for grabs as where. It is true that many scholars exploring the role of context have focused on time in their analysis, so questions of a/synchronicity in chat , ‘just-in-time’ knowledge, and so forth are equally conceptually important terms in contemporary educational discourse, as much as metaphors of location and place.

One obvious implication here is that just as the theorisation of learning has become detached from simply the study of schooling towards more lifelong and life-wide processes, so the unbundling of learning from the resource-intensive capitalisation of mass schooling will mean that future education models will continue to spin out along the axes of time and place towards greater individualisation and niche experiences. Whether the structure of the State or even new and other structures of locale, region or community will begin to impose structure and homogeneity on this process of disintegration is a political challenge for the future. It may be as Sections 3.3 and 3.4 argued, that this idea of greater and greater individualisation will not work in an era of greater competition and standardisation, or it may be that diversification is key. As always, then, the key question is: for whom? Which sections of society gain and which lose? But, as I argue in the Futures scenarios in Section 3 above, that is what policy is for.

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Zittrain, J. (2008) The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop it: And How to Stop It. London, Allen Lane.

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.

http://www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/bch_challenge_paper_spaces_places_andrew_harrison.pdf

The challenge of analysing and acknowledging the multiple timescales of human activity in respect of learning has also been recognised by, for example, Lemke (2000). This essay is itself spatially limited and does not allow me to discuss fully the role of time which, at one level, is part of any discussion of space. Certainly in Section 3 discussion of changing spaces is sometimes a question of time-shifting locations for learning and re-ordering places in learning narratives (where and when we study, take exams, and so on).

http://www.infed.org/biblio/b-nonfor.htm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/oct/06/youtube.youngpeople

Gee’s (2004) ideas in respect of the significance of ‘affinity spaces’ in terms of participation are a particularly good example of this.

see especially the work undertaken by Thomson, Hall and Jones: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/education/projects/plt-creative-partnerships/index.php

See the ongoing research project: http://www2.ioe.ac.uk/ioe/cms/get.asp?cid=18911and18911_0=19964

Although it may seem counter-intuitive, studies of mobile technologies often offer insight at this level because, although mobile technologies appear to position individuals in global maps, studies actually show how immediate social context is a key part of mobile ICT use (Ito, Okabe and Matsuda, 2006).

There is not space to discuss the role of English in this globalisation process (see Pennycook, 2006) and scholarship around Second Language teaching may be an important contribution to this level of debate, an issue we in the UK tend to be un-self-aware about.

http://www.tlrp.org/pub/documents/TELcomm.pdf

[12] The term justification is taken from Boltanski and Chiapello (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007) and is used deliberately to explain how capitalism recuperates artistic and social critique.

An idea for further study here would be to connect the scholarship of ‘precarious labour’ (eg Lloyd, 2005; Ross, 2003) which emphasises ways of behaving and being as the modality of working in the creative economy with the production of a certain kind of subjectivity produced by learning in digital-networked times.

See for example http://www.vanderbilt.edu/litspace/Synchrony/index.html

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.

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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.

Rosanvallon (2008), a historian and political philosopher, talks about the need to reinvent democracy: elections are not enough to ensure the system’s legitimacy and it is urgent to develop a democracy of “interaction”. His position, close to a form of deliberative democracy, also implies the reform of the current functioning of the representative system. This theoretical framework is different from one that opposes a liberal and individualist conception of citizenship to a communitarian conception. Nevertheless, it can be associated with Haste’s argument (2004) that one becomes a citizen through praxis. Haste and Hogan (2006) linked the moral to the political dimension, in relation to young people and citizenship. They argue that the distinction of private and public spheres in Western thought is not useful for addressing the motivational dimensions of political behaviour.

For the purpose of this paper the author adopts the normative and Western view that democracy, as a way to become autonomous, can only exist through constant re-invention, and a citizen can only “be” when she is empowered to participate in the creation of common rules. This is a way to say that meaning and central symbolic meanings are constructed, and only when we accept our responsibility as meaning-makers, can we exist as persons and not subjects. In this way, a human being is seen as a social animal, as communitarian arguments would suggest, but not every community or participation meets the criterion of autonomy that in Castoriadis’s thought has a Marxist and psychoanalytic dimension and is not linked to liberal perspectives as Taylor (1991) implies.

The concept of the “self” is used as dialogical, as a product and producer of a changing social and cultural context, for the purpose of this paper. This position derives from the socio-psychological tradition of social representations (Moscovici, 1984), but also from recent developments in the perspective of the dialogical self. The other is thus conceptualized as a constitutive part of the self in terms of a multiplicity of voices emerging from global-local dialectics. Hermans and Dimaggio (2007) alternate the concept of “self” with that of “identity” as in the title of their article “Self, Identity, and Globalization in Times of Uncertainty: A Dialogical Analysis”. In this review paper this author also alternates the term “self-efficacy and citizenship” as a dimension of a social identity. In an era of increased globalisation, the number and nature of voices of the self have expanded and increasingly involve mediated forms of dialogue. From the perspective of critical psychology, Papadopoulos (2008) provides a non-essentialist definition, of “identity”, inspired from the work of Vygotsky (1934). The main idea is that “identity” is never “identical” to what it used to be. The sense of self is on the move in a way, more than something stable.

Although self or identity as concepts can be highly ambiguous and imply tensions and contradictions, at the level of lay thinking, the self needs to be represented as a narrative with a certain continuity, in order to have a sense of well being, at least in western cultures (Hermans and Dimaggio, 2007). What is more, the possibility of projecting oneself to the future is essential not only for an individual sense of well-being, but is also an important dimension for a society or community (Mead, 1934; Butterworth, 1992).

Other conceptualizations of self that can be useful are those of Lahlou and Slevin. Lahlou (2008) proposes a conception of the representation of the self for lay thinking that enables us to make a link with technology and citizenship. He claims that the issue of identity is complex because it refers both to how we define ourselves from a subjective point of view and how we define ourselves to others. He distinguishes three dimensions: a physical (subject as body), a social (subject as a social position), and a biographical (subject as the product of past experiences and desires). Slevin (2000) draws from Giddens (1991) and views self as a symbolic project in late modernity. He refers to the distinctive tensions and difficulties which people have to resolve in order to preserve a coherent narrative of self-identity, what Giddens calls “dilemmas of the self” that can also be related to the “dialogical self” perspective.

This review paper is particularly interested in citizenship as the social dimension of the self and the way a sense of self-inefficacy, or a lack of recognition as an actor, can be constructive or destructive in re-establishing a sense of power for young people. This feeling has to do, on the one hand, with the dissolution of traditional ways to structure symbolic meanings after the end of the Cold War such as the left-right spectrum in Western society (Haste, 2004). On the other hand, it is linked to the intensification of globalization with the feeling of uncertainty that it brings (Hermans and Dimaggio, 2007). The understanding of what is positive or constructive is related to everything that enhances life and diversity that allows a construction of the “self” which is both a creation and creator of society. This derives from the political philosophy of Castoriadis, who links the notion of individual and collective autonomy and liberation, to democracy (1987).

The notion of citizenship cannot be limited to the nation-state. Citizenship implies a community, a group where someone can be a member, a citizen, but this paper focuses more on the socio-psychological dimension of the concept, especially since globalization and technology allow different representations of the communities we create and belong to. Local, national, global, but also virtual and imaginary communities can be taken into consideration.

Where things stand: Do young adults have a feeling of inefficacy in the public sphere?

If autonomy is a normative objective, this review starts from the premise that the feeling of inefficacy at the public sphere (Bandura, 1997) alienates youth from more conventional forms of participation in the representative democratic system. In that way, the social dimension of the self, “citizenship”, becomes problematic. The feeling of inefficacy is based in a number of “realities” that young people face in different European countries:

1. The formal education system is still inspired by a mentality of authority and hierarchy that is not accepted not only by the more disadvantaged youth but also from those who are materially and culturally more fortunate (at least in Greece) (Fragoudaki; Dragonas, 1997). Although it provides knowledge about the functioning of the political system through a range of different classes, it does not empower young people (Condor and Gibson, 2007). Since citizenship is conceptualized as dialogical (Hermans and Dimaggio, 2007) and action oriented (Haste, 2004), it is through the possibility of changing their everyday realities that young people could be empowered and this could lead to their being recognized by significant others as existing, acting citizens.

This dimension is not always present for a number of reasons. Resistance to authority as it was conceived in the past and materialized by institutions is one of the characteristics of younger generations according to authors such as Sanford (2007). The use of computers among high school students, according to Wighting (2006), contributes to the development of a sense of community that can be linked to academic success. However it does not change the structure of an education system that could be defined as “monological” in the sense that accurate information and knowledge is “top down”. On the other hand, education can lead young adults to higher and more sophisticated expectations of the political system than older generations (Bennett, 2008).

2. The material condition of young people and the less young that is characterized by mobility, the sense of the ephemeral and insecurity.

Youth as a social construction

Youth, as a sociological category, seems to extend at least to 30 year-olds, according to the way researchers in the social sciences set up their categories in Europe. Although there are researches that still refer to 12 to 21 year-olds as the young people (Haste and Hogan, 2006), there are many others in different European countries that define young adults as the 18 to 30 year olds: for example, the research report of Laaksonen (2000) on young people in Finland, Sweden and Germany refers to young people as “18-29 years-old”. In other cases, there is reference to the “generation of 20-40 years-old”, as Generation X (Sanford, 2007).

Concerning questions of life style, the 20-40 years-old could have a lot in common: this has to do with their precarious life-style that is extended more and more not only in Europe (ie Laaksonen, 2000), but also in the United States (Heiman, 2001). A stable relationship, job and independence from parents that used to be the criteria for entering the world of adults, seem to be postponed indefinitely, since youth is not only a biological but also a cultural value and social construction (Galland, 1993; Cicchelli, 2001). In that way, an ageing European population extends youth further and further, so there is no clear limit since certain “youth” lifestyles are adopted by older populations. Jobs are less and less stable, in different levels of the social hierarchy, as is income.

Changing jobs is also related to mobility, within the same country or abroad, or between different professions. Sanford’s report (2007) concerning the USA concludes that mobility is only going to increase with higher levels of education. The decline of fixed benefit pensions and increasing globalisation imply that social capital definitions that rely on more stable residency patterns put them at variance with individual realities and engines of economic growth. Even for more fortunate, well paid young adults, there is an alienating effect of the question “which is the community I belong to?” and a work affiliation that alternates with unemployment is not enough to offer an alternative to the weakening of more “traditional” social identities, national or local. Relationships can be less stable due to this fact. For the more disadvantaged, this feeling of the ephemeral, and the inability to project oneself to the future, gives a feeling of marginalization. Why vote for tax laws if one doesn’t pay taxes? Bennett (2008) and Heiman (2001) imply that this position could be a sign of sophistication.

Class differences exist, of course, and so does gender, but the author’s hypothesis is that there is no category excluded from this trend or from the feeling that they don’t matter. Apart from income, other characteristics differentiate the social dimension of the young generation’s representation of the self: there are many differences related to their culture, gender, religion, and their interaction, to give a few examples. Minorities, for example, or young Muslims could face different challenges from the majority of young people. Hopkins and Hopkins (2006), mention the lack of studies on how minorities conceptualize stigmatized identities, for example, British Muslims’ conceptualization of “Islamophobia”. This tension is related not only to the traditional public space of the nation-state but also to the local and to the global or cosmopolitan space.

3. A sense of inefficacy and “empowerment” through violent communities, or a subversive way to practice democratic values.

Could the “Local” dimension be the solution to autonomy and empowerment? Sauvadet (2006), in a series of interviews and participant observation with “dangerous” youth (that for him extends at least to the age of 35) of the French banlieus, the suburbs, insists on the link between the material conditions that lead to a lack of a space of their own and to them being on the streets, the prolonged periods of unemployment and especially the fact that they cannot become materially independent from their parents, for which they are criticized. But most problematically they lack the facility to project themselves into the future (Wakslak et al, 2008). The community they belong to, their “gang”, could represent a community where they matter, but in a destructive way since they are stigmatized by the larger society.

This sociological research is relevant to social psychological findings (eg. Klandermans, 1997; Stümer and Simon, 2004) that individuals for whom group identity is more relevant are more likely to participate in collective action than individuals for whom group identity is less relevant. However, there are different types of “collective action”. Van Zomeren, Spears and Leach (2008) who study two psychological mechanisms of collective action, differentiate two ways to deal with collective disadvantage: one, problem-focused coping and two, emotion-focused coping that seems relevant for the angry youth of the “banlieus”. Studies on the affective component of relative deprivation show that it is linked to collective action (Smith and Ortiz, 2002). What is more, the power of collective identification to mobilize people for collective action has been proved to derive partly from processes of identity affirmation (Simon, Trötschel, Dähne, 2008). So, the young disadvantaged and migrant youth who organize either in drug dealing enterprises, or in violence, practice collective action and certain values of a democratic community.

A study that involved participant observation with a crack gang, done in Chicago by Venkatesh (2000), a social anthropologist, comes to similar conclusions concerning the life of the community: the gang was one of approximately 100 branches or franchises, of an organisation. The college educated leader of the franchise reported to a central leadership that was called the board of directors. Three officers reported directly to the franchise leader. Beneath them were 20 foot soldiers, dreaming of becoming officers, and 200 members who paid dues to the gang for protection, or for the chance to become a foot soldier. Although certain aspects of this organisation are similar to that of a business, the way the leader took care of his people and their families is similar to that of a community where each member counts: the gang invested in “community events” which would include paying for a dead member’s funeral and giving a stipend of up to three year’s wages to the victim’s family: “Their families are our families, we been knowing these folks our whole lives, so we grieve when they grieve”.

In that sense communities can be of utmost importance, and “helping with the community” a sign of civic involvement, but the type of community could also differentiate the outcome. The particular character of a community could have different effects on their members and enhance (or not) democratic values and autonomy. The way in which the local community relates to the national or global level could also be an important variable of the configuration.

4. At the level of the nation-state, disaffection from conventional political parties whose role is traditionally to be a channel of participation and legitimate expression of contest in the public sphere, means disaffection from traditional forms of contest. It seems that dissatisfied youth do not use them to mediate their anger. The public sphere becomes the “macrocosm” where they are not important (Magioglou, 2008). Feelings of belonging to a national community such as the British, the Greeks, the Japanese, do not always signify confidence in the state and the importance of participating in elections that do not change their everyday life. Single issue politics are the result; (for example French youth demonstrating against a law of the Right Wing government in 2006 that proposed a special “youth” job contract of limited duration, or Greek youth demonstrating against changes to the education system, or the anti-war movement).

Several studies in the last ten years have demonstrated political apathy, cynicism and the lack of political participation by young people in the political system. Their results refer to “conventional” forms of political participation that include voting and party affiliation. The MORI Omnibus survey in 1996, for example, demonstrates that age is a key determinant of involvement in formal politics. 40% of 18-25 year-olds did not vote in the 1997 election in Britain; until 1997 the average age of party members was 48 for the Labour Party and 62 for the Conservative (Fahmy, 1999). This research has drawn attention to the consequences of growing economic marginalization of youth in terms of their access to social rights of citizenship (Haste, 2004).

Political apathy is related to the impact of economic and social hardship, according to Pacheco and Plutzer (2008), using data from the National Education Longitudinal Survey, 1988-2000 for the United States. A random set of 80% of respondents was selected for follow-up interviews and 50% of those students completed the entire panel. Their results show that disadvantage in the family of origin is correlated with later markers of disadvantage and all have negative impact on turnout for voting. Bontempi and Pocaterra (2007) found that youth voter turnout in most European countries has declined significantly, despite rises in education and income, particularly in long-established democracies like the United Kingdom.

In a more recent study concerning the forms of political participation in England, such as the MORI polls for the Nestlé Family Monitor (2003), the figures for expected “conventional” political activity were similar to the international average but for “unconventional” activity including legal and illegal protest they were well below (28% for England, compared to 44%, the international average to participation in non violent protest). Haste (2004) argues that this data prove the change of the notion of citizenship and democracy for young people, together with the way they co-construct narratives that make sense of experience. This interpretation can be applied to the way other European young adults, such as the young Greeks, represent democracy (Magioglou, 2008).

However, if the notion of “political” is extended in order to include a “moral” dimension, there are results that claim that the young people are politically active. Haste and Hogan (2006) have argued that alienation, or a feeling of inefficacy, could be associated for the case of the British youth with the “conventional” forms of political participation, such as voting. On the contrary, there are other forms of civic engagement, such as helping with the community and making one’s voice heard, in which the British youth engage. The findings are based on research carried out in 2005 using on-line questionnaires and interviews in schools. Participants were from 11 to 21 year’s old. Only a quarter of the population was inactive in the civic domain as defined by the study. Although these findings are very optimistic, certain items were linked to a normative action and the attributes of the “good citizen” questionable: for example, a vast majority of the participants thinks that obeying the law is very important (90%) but only 48% would protest against a law they believe unjust. Obeying the law could be a way to respect common rules, or a way to respect a reified “power” one has nothing to do with. More qualitative analysis could illustrate the meanings related to that. At the same time, helping the community could be extremely important unless the young person is taking up predetermined, “monological” roles. In this case it is far from being an act of citizenship the way it is usually understood.

A study that focuses on the representation of political participation with a qualitative approach is that of Condor and Gibson (2007). After a conversation analysis on interviews with young white adults from 18 to 24 years old, and following Billig’s perspective on ideological dilemmas, (Billig, 1988), Condor and Gibson argue that everyday understanding of political participation showed dilemmatic tensions. These tensions were situated between values of active citizenship, on the one hand, and norms of liberal individualism on the other. More specifically, Marquand (1991) argues that the British liberal individualist ethos is associated with a “passive” model of citizenship: one in which the public sphere is understood to be populated by autonomous individuals who, far from having a duty to participate in public affairs, are accorded rights to protect them from interference by the community. Concerning political efficacy, the respondents expressed the view that their vote would not make any difference or it made no difference which party was in power. Although they justified political disengagement as usual or appropriate for people of their age or stage of life, these same individuals also tended to orient to a normative assumption that political engagement was a marker of maturity and civic responsibility. In conclusion, the authors questioned whether everyday understandings of responsible citizenship entail injunctions to political action.

These findings are similar to results on the meaning of democracy for young adults in Greece (Magioglou, 2008). Part of the participants, a group that was defined as using a “consensual” way of thinking, saw themselves as citizens “to be”. They considered that for now, they would apply democratic values in their “microcosmos”, waiting to be fully integrated socially, to be effective in the public sphere. They had a strong feeling of political inefficacy, but that didn’t matter for the time being because they belonged to a group with justified optimistic aspirations of upper social mobility. Either their family was well off, or they were in a sector with job opportunities, and they focused on becoming more independent financially and socially from their family. This group was considered to be in a state of a “waiting room”, postponing their life as citizens. However, for the bigger part of the sample, this situation was associated with anger and feelings of alienation.

Trends: the role of new technologies and self efficacy construction

The public appeal of films of popular culture such as ‘The Matrix’, is an example of the link between a feeling of inefficacy and the fears of the digitalised world to come. Philosophers such as Zizek (2004) have analysed its importance using a Lacanian method of reading the reaction of the public: the role of ‘The Matrix’ is seen as the reduction of the subject to a total passivity, of its use as an instrument. Is liberation possible? Can the digitalized world, on the contrary, provide the means to a form of liberation from the state of subjection and inefficacy, and contribute to the creation of autonomous citizens? It is interesting that the scenario of the film is so close to a case of paranoia reported in 1919 by the psychoanalyst Victor Tausk: a group of schizophrenics believed that their problems were caused by an “influencing machine” operated by alien forces. The patients saw the machine as feeding on the emotions and “souls” of human beings unconscious of their true state. Indeed for these patients, knowing about the machine that is “seeing” the real, could be fatal because … it revealed the givens of everyday reality to be fabrications. Sanal (2008), who mentions this case, concludes that to this day, the use of machine metaphors marks persistent fears of invasion, possession and authoritarian control.

Lahlou (2008), a social psychologist, considers that there is a process of digitalization in society where three levels, the physical, the mental and the institutional guide subjects into their activity track. The physical level refers to material reality and artifacts, it provides affordances (Gibson, 1982). Representations and practices provide possible interpretations of the situation and enable subjects to elaborate and plan behaviours. At a social level, institutions set the rules to be applied to maintain order and foster cooperation and communities of interest. He points that ten years ago Google did not exist and that now, children’s sociability is made up of SMS, blogs, chats and instant messaging. Although these systems are designed tec-down, teenage sociability is one of the outcomes of these techniques. At the cognitive level, Alexandrov’s findings (2008), based on experiments conducted on animals in neuroscience, concern learning processes. They show that by training our children with digital-learning techniques, using them on an everyday basis, we are modifying at the neural level, the very way we perceive the world. The brain for him is a system in which every new learning is built on existing structures and modifies the previous organization. Therefore, previously formed behaviour is modified by forming a new behaviour. Even “classic” objects take on a new meaning in this new context of practice.

Lahlou (2008) adds the notion of “face” and “persona” as dimensions of a person’s notion of “identity” in the digital world. If a person’s physical “identity”, the body, is of limited value in the digital world, according to Lahlou, the social, psychological and subjective dimensions become the useful cues for transactions and interactions in the digital world. “Face” is more than the mere presentation of self as considered in Western psychology, following Goffman (1963). He includes in this notion the Eastern Asian sense of moral integrity, intention, position, propriety and outward behaviour.

The notion of “Persona” has also been used in the ICT literature, especially for interaction in media spaces. It is either considered as a partial individual construct, a sub-self or alias, created as an agent or proxy by the subject, or as a passive identity created by gathering activity traces of a subject (Clarke, 1994). The “Second Life” game is a virtual space where Personas are used. However, it is considered that in both cases of “face” and of “Persona”, there is an active role of the person who is creating and using them in the digital world, giving a sense of power and efficacy. Negative experiences are also possible (Helsper, 2008), but that does not limit the possibilities for a new sense of efficacy.

Possible directions with the help of digital media towards a feeling of efficacy and empowerment in new “spaces”

Magioglou’s data in Greece (2005; 2008) show that the reaction of young adults to the sense of inefficacy is taking two directions that could be expressed in a constructive or destructive way:

a) the exercise of democracy in the private sphere of the “microcosm” which means one’s physical self, the family, circle of friends, communities one belongs to (face to face or virtual, connecting through the internet). The microcosm can become extended through the possibilities technology can offer in the digital world, and the “personal becomes political” as Giddens has argued. In this way, the delimitation of what counts as moral and political change, together with the meaning of the political itself (Haste and Hogan, 2006).

b) Refusal of the actual national or international political system and adoption of a mystical, spiritual and virtual conception of democracy, associated to the meaning of life, to love and beauty. Violence is not excluded as a means to an end, but no participants could find an alternative that was worth or plausible to fight for.

In both cases, Maglioglou considers that technology is used either as a means to escape from the feeling of inefficacy, even in destructive ways, or as a means to create new realities, and it is closer to the notion of citizenship as a form of autonomy. An example is the participation in alternative groups and communities that organise altermondialist manifestations.

The sense of inefficacy and the physical dimension of the self

Contrary to Lahlou (2008) who underplays the role of the physical dimension of the self in the digitalized world, several studies show its importance. The body, as part of the self and a means of interaction with otherness, could be a dimension where one could feel important, using different ways to dress and express oneself (Riley, 2008); having eating disorders, using drugs or stabbing, having sex. There is a sense of immediacy and a sense of control that is a possible way out of the feeling of inefficacy. The facility of younger generations with new technologies offers another option where one could “matter” by creating or participating in already existing communities, based on new forms of subjectivity. The case of the “pro-ana” (pro-anorexia) websites is a combination of both dimensions for a creative, but destructive form of “citizenship” and empowerment that combines one’s physical and virtual reality. Giles (2006) describes how people who share experiences of eating disorders create a cyberspace community where they can meet virtually in a positive and supportive environment. The community creates specific rules of inclusion-exclusion and the result is, as the author says, a “rich tapestry of identity work”. Different subgroups are created and the boundaries between them are contested. This example is a way of creating a community where one “matters” but in a very self- and group-destructive way. Hermans and Dimaggio (2007) mention a big increase in cases such as eating disorders, which are associated with identity problems.

In the case of disadvantaged young people, there may be a lack of access to technology (Bennett, 2007) because of the absence of material (computers, space to work on the computer); and the family TV is not very accessible since they share it. Violence could take more or less digitalized forms. In the case of violent youth (stabbing for adolescents, drug users) there is a possibility of feeling that one “matters’ and a sense of negative efficacy through the destructive use of one’s or other people’s bodies. Terrorist groups networking through the internet could be a digitalized way to express anger and construct a positive self identity, by relinquishing one’s autonomy.

In contrast are the examples of globalized altermondialist social movements which organize through the internet and bring together many people from different geographical areas which share cultural, ideological and political characteristics. They show how virtual communities are also real and participate in the public sphere, proposing a point of view in a constructive way. The work of Della Porta (Della Porta et al, 2006) on “globalization from below”, shows in a series of studies how altermondialist demonstrations were organized in Italy against the G8 in Genoa and the ESF in Florence, protesting against a certain form of globalization. The demonstrations expressed a strong demand for political participation that political parties no longer seemed able to respond to. Protest developed outside the parties and presented strong criticism of representative democracy. Although exhibiting a slow start, some concerns start to be debated by left wing parties.

What is the percentage of young adults in this movement? Taking into consideration the importance of communication through the internet, and the facility of younger populations with it, we assume that they form an important part of it. At the end of the book the authors affirm that citizens’ trust and interest in conventional forms of democratic participation seem to be reduced and that “the new cycle of protest is witness to a growing demand for politics, albeit of a new, unexpected type, in particular from the new generations”. Held’s notion of cosmopolitan democracy could be close to this kind of civic engagement at the global level (Held, 2008).

New forms of efficacy in a new kind of public space: digital mobs and dialogic publicness

Self efficacy could be strengthened through the use of control and the expression of one’s opinion that the internet allows. However, if the formation of a digital public opinion becomes the “Panopticon” of Bentham, this could be another negative way to practice self-efficacy. Dennis (2008) mentions the case of the “dog-shit girl”, name given to a girl by South Korean bloggers who refused to clean her dog’s shit on the subway,. A passenger took a picture of the girl and posted it on a popular Korean website. Soon after, people started searching for her identity until they found her, in order to “punish” her for her behaviour. Within days, her pictures and parodies where everywhere, and were soon transferred to Western sites. The girl in question had to quit university because of the humiliation and even contemplated suicide. Dennis, using also other examples, raises the question: are we facing the constitution of “digital mobs” with a mass psychology, which find new techniques to exercise their power? This kind of “public opinion” amplified through the use of new technologies such as mobile phones with digital cameras and the internet could have destructive or constructive aspects, depending on the way they are used. The result also depends on whether the social dimension of the selves, this tec-citizenship, does or does not involve a notion of responsibility (Haste, 2004).

In a more positive framework, Slevin (2000) speaks of the dialogical mediated publicness, the possibility to create “dialogical spaces” through the internet, which was not the case with the television and the radio. Sanford (2007) found through written surveys and oral interviews with young people in Austin, from 2000 to 2003, that the respondents thought quite deeply about public life and civic involvement when given the opportunity. Her research objective was to test Putnam’s assumption regarding the typical characterizations of Generation X actors (which includes for her 20 to 40 year-olds). She claims that the respondents are actively involved in a new form of civic life. In the contemporary economy, increased mobility is a fact of life. Increasing educational levels have long been associated with higher levels of social involvement but also with higher levels of mobility. A “just in time” social capital activities will become the norm.

However, the population she refers to, and the categories of “tech elites”, “cyber-democrats”, “wireheads” and “trailing Xers”, is composed of young people who belong to social and cultural elite. They lead technology companies, work in the intersection of politics and technology, are cubicle dwelling functionaries or students. Instead of privileging the vote, they place greater value on the work ethic and on being politically informed and active. They reject formality and structure in favour of greater responsiveness. They see technology as a powerful tool and they are creators rather than joiners. They place personal choice over transcendent obligation and they embrace a more personal sort of reciprocity where one asks for help to animate a personal cycle rather than do something nice and animate an abstract social cycle. They look for low social barriers of entry and exit and they enjoy creative work, easily blurring the lines between work time, social time, personal time and community time. The author has an “individualistic” conception of this generation that is quite different to the young public who participated in the humiliation of the “dog-shit girl”.

Conclusion and future prospects

The question that should be raised is in what ways education could empower young people so that they become “autonomous” citizens, confident that they matter, and creators of meanings and narratives instead of meaning-consumers and subjects. The question is also how the feeling of inefficacy could be overcome in a way that respects “democratic values” and doesn’t result in the physical or symbolic destruction of self and others in order to feel empowered. The more mobility becomes the norm and youth becomes extended as an in-between unstable category, the more education could become dialogical and reach young and less young populations on the move.

The young people who watched ‘Matrix‘, and adhered to the conception of a reality of alienation and relinquishment of one’s autonomy by a digitalized world, those who were seen in the US as “slackers” (Heiman, 2001), were, with the dot.com generation, or the “digital natives” those who also massively voted for Barak Obama. In ‘Matrix‘, resistance starts from an awakening from the false consciousness to a “new” reality, that has a common point with the old one, it is exclusive and it is the “truth”, a way to see things that extinguish ambiguity. However, uncertainty seems to increase as people become more mobile and communities can both threaten and sustain autonomy. A youth gang of drug dealers can be an example: young people learn their respect for a sense of hierarchy, courage, solidarity, even a notion of business and deliberation. The community enhances their self-esteem and also makes them feel empowered, that they matter. Fundamentalist communities could also function as a haven where certain values of participation can be learned and practiced. The pro-ana virtual communities are another example of a creative form of identity construction that combines a physical with a symbolic dimension. In the past, fascist and Nazi regimes took pains to integrate the youth into some forms of organisation and participation was often obligatory.

However, there is a problem with this kind of communities. They do not work towards a form of autonomy or some kind of “liberation” both of the self and of the group or society one belongs to. That is why it is alarming that the category “obey the law” is deemed important for a good citizen for 90% of the British youth. If the law is something that is imposed from outside, a kind of reified power, this is the way a subject of an authoritarian rule would also answer.

The results of the USA elections in November 2008, show a different direction and could be considered a “surprise”, or what Haste (2008) has characterized as a “knight’s move”, with the proof of massive mobilisation of the younger generations for Barak Obama. The internet seems to have played an important role for this mobilisation. Is this a proof of the “return” of the American youth to the traditional ways of political participation? Is it something exceptional or will it create a phenomenon that will also influence young people in other parts of the world? It is already significant that young people outside of the US have manifested their support, so it could be an event that will change the way younger generations have related to politics in the last two decades.

Bennett (2008) finishes his chapter on changing citizenship in the digital age with a question: “are politicians, parents, educators, policymakers, and curriculum developers willing to allow young citizens to more fully explore, experience, and expand democracy, or will they continue to force them to just read all about it?” The question for this review is: are we supposing that we have a perfect political system and our only preoccupation as societies is how to replicate it and indoctrinate young generations? But even if the answer is yes, maybe democracy is about re-invention, creation and re-creation of the self and our communities in a way that we take responsibility for our meaning and policy making in our every day lives. Digital media offer new possibilities by being “dialogical” and groups with less power that can use them such as young people could enlarge their political “power”.

Education, which used to be related to school and university, could become also more dialogical and flexible. Formal education could turn to a “laboratory of a polis” instead of restricting civic education to the transmission of knowledge for a world that seems to be out of reach, or that does not concern young people’s everyday life (Coleman, 2006). Concerning the future, the way the different actors will interact, the role of specific events and their symbolic power, could show if we take the direction of greater autonomy for self and society. However, the risk of higher degrees of flexibility could be overwhelming for persons or groups who seek ready-made ideological and heteronomous ways to relate to one another.

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Getting to know Web 2.0

The technological innovations that have enabled what we call Web 2.0, or the Read/Write Web, are perhaps best understood in the context of the costs of contribution to the earlier incarnations of the World Wide Web. In the early days of the web, which we can call Web 1.0, posting information online was expensive, time-consuming, and required specialized knowledge. One had to register a domain name, hire a hosting server, learn HTML, and use FTP tools to upload files to a Web server in order to put a page on the World Wide Web. These barriers were not overwhelming, hobbyists could learn the skills and commit the resources to participate, but as a result of these barriers, only a tiny portion of the community which used the web was responsible for providing the content. Most people just went to read, and then later, as bandwidth grew, to listen and watch.

Over time, web developers increasingly added functionality to websites that allowed people to more easily contribute content to the web. Some of the earliest of these sites were discussion boards, a feature of the internet from even the days before the web, which allowed multiple users to easily contribute information to the web without needing to learn how to program in HTML or register a domain. These simple discussion spaces embodied the crucial design principle that has driven the development of Web 2.0: make it as simple, as time-cheap, and inexpensive as possible for ordinary Web users to contribute. We’ll soon turn to how this principle has found expression in a diverse variety of platforms – blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networks, virtual worlds – but first it’s worth teasing out the significance of designing for simplified contributions.

Lowering the costs of communicating and barriers to participation

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. Economists would say that when developers made it easier to contribute to the web, they were lowering the interaction costs of communication. 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 realized. Understanding these social possibilities requires better understanding the technical design principle that has enabled them.

The dramatically lower costs of communicating information over the web can be illustrated with a simple thought experiment: how would you share a video with all of your friends in 1980 and today? In 1980, sharing a video message with your friends would involve the following steps: filming on a tape, transferring the tape to VHS, copying each individual VHS tape, packaging and addressing each tape, and mailing the tape to everyone you know. The time costs of such a venture were basically prohibitively high. People certainly had an interest in seeing each other’s video clips – recall the remarkable run of Bob Saget and America’s Funniest Home Videos – but they were simply too expensive to share within individual social networks.

Now consider the costs of adding video to YouTube. Click: I start my Web Cam, and I spout wisdom. Click: I save it. Click: I open YouTube. Click: I upload the file. Click: I label it with a “tag” so that others can find it (tagging is discussed further below). And for bonus points, Click: I change my Facebook status update to alert everyone in my social network that I’ve just added a video. There is some degree of learning curve to figure out how all of these applications and services work. But as people learn their way around one Web 2.0 service, they realize that Web 2.0 tools share many common features and it is increasingly easy to learn the next. Compared to the economic costs of these kinds of interactions in the past, global communication today is almost impossibly free.

Lowering communication costs doesn’t just lead to more communication, it leads to qualitatively different behavior by web users. For instance, it turns out that if you make it extremely time-cheap to contribute an article to an online encyclopedia, that people will create a Wikipedia with 2.5 million of them. It also turns out that if you make the editorial process decentralized and consensual, that people will anonymously and collaboratively edit those same 2.5 million articles and come to editorial loggerheads over only a tiny percentage of them. It turns out that if you make it time-cheap to post short updates about your day and read at a glance all of the updates of your friends and colleagues, that millions will start following the daily and hourly turns of people’s lives through tools like Facebook and Twitter (both to be discussed further). By itself, little updates like “Struggling with my statistics assignment,” are rather dull and prosaic. But aggregated into thousands of little updates, friends are tracking each other’s lives through Web 2.0 tools much more closely than has ever been possible by all but the closest social and working relationships. As a final example, the ease of producing and sharing online videos has allowed for the new social phenomena of viral videos, publically available online videos which are seen by hundreds of thousands or millions of people, which are typically created, published, and distributed outside of the traditional studio/publisher information networks. Because cheaper communication allows new communication media and practices, we have a whole new set of shared cultural texts created and distributed outside of the traditional, hierarchical publication networks.

Lowering the interaction costs of communication leads to perhaps the most important feature of Web 2.0: its inclusive, collaborative capacity. The new Read/Write web is allowing people to work together, share information, and reach new and potentially enormous audiences outside some of the traditional structures of power, authority, and communication in our society. The social developments that have resulted from the Web 2.0 phenomena are best understood through a lens of democratization, but we must keep in mind the caveat that democracy means many different things in many different places (Haste and Hogan, 2006). Democratizing the web may mean one thing for the wealthy in the West with instant access to the web through wireless-connected laptop computers, and another thing for the poor in the West who access the web through public connections in schools and libraries (Jenkins, 2007). Democratizing the web may mean one thing for students in rural Africa with dial-up modem connections on cast off computers from Europe, and another thing for bloggers in China whose content is scrutinized by an army of government censors and language police. While democratization may mean different things in these diverse areas, certain commonalities hold as well. More people are getting involved in a series of increasingly global conversations, more people have the capacity to share their thoughts and insights to the world, and more people have the capacity to weigh in on the value and virtue of media and commentary. In older media forms the boundaries between authorship and readership, speaker and listener, producer and consumer remained quite clear. “The new Web”, as professor Leon Watts notes “has broken down the authorship-readership roles into degrees of contact and reciprocation of infinitely variable granularity” (Personal Communication). In decentralizing the control over the flow of global information, Web 2.0 holds tremendous potential to shift the balance of power from the elite to the masses, with all of the chaos, creativity, exceptionality and mediocrity that have marked the expansion of political democracy.

Whether or not this potential is realized, whether or not the key Web 2.0 design principle of simplify contributing leads to gains in democratization depends on how developers, publishers, telecommunications companies and users negotiate the evolving spaces that allow for all this communication. Before considering possible scenarios for the future impact of Web 2.0 platforms on society, we should now examine what some of these platforms are and how they are evolving.

Instantiations of Web 2.0

Web 2.0 technologies may be animated by a single design principle, simplify contributing, but they take a wide array of forms. Some of the most visible Web 2.0 tools are categories of platforms. One of the first platforms of the Read/Write Web was Web logs, or blogs, which are websites that are like public journals. Blog authors, or bloggers, post chronologically-ordered journal entries to a site, and each entry has a feature that allows readers to comment, allowing for two-way interaction. Blog hosting services like Blogger, now owned by Google, developed around the turn of the century and allowed even people without any programming skills to create and publish blogs. Wikis, websites which are authored by a community of people, emerged as another platform that allowed for easy, collaborative publication of information. The most famous wiki, Wikipedia, is authored by millions of anonymous contributors, and indeed anyone can click on any page in Wikipedia at any time and add anything that they so desire. Podcasting tools allowed for the uploading and syndication of audio files, and podcasts are a kind of audio blog. YouTube pioneered online video sharing by creating a space where people could upload small video files and make them publically available. These diverse spaces have fostered new forms of global, multimedia, communication and publication.

Online social networks also fall within the domain of Web 2.0. In America, the two largest sites are MySpace and Facebook, where users create a web page profile, invite friends to connect to their profile, and use the page as a space to publish personal content and connect with friends and co-workers. While broad scale online social networks are the most well known, niche social networks exist as well, and services like Ning allow users to create their own mini online social networks, such as Classroom 2.0, a social network for educators interested in Web 2.0. Virtual worlds, including online games, are, to some degree, other forms of online social networks, where users create avatars which inhabit three-dimensional virtual worlds. Second Life is the largest online virtual world community, and World of Warcraft, with over 10 million members worldwide, is the world’s largest online game community. Both virtual worlds are also integrated with other forms of Web 2.0 tools like discussion boards, blogs, and wikis.

For those who have not closely followed the growth of Web 2.0, the scale of adoption is staggering. In America in 2006, over 50% of teenagers – across racial and socioeconomic lines – have created pages on online social networks like Facebook and MySpace, and in all likelihood this percentage has increased in the last two years (Lenhart, Madden, Macgill, and Smith, 2007). As of October 2008, Wikipedia had over 2.5 million pages, over 250 million page edits, over 8 million registered users, and over 150,000 people who had made an edit in the last 30 days. In February of 2008 Technorati was tracking over 112 million blogs, which doesn’t include as many as 73 million Chinese blogs (Helmond 2008). Even in the US education sector, which was rated dead last out of 30 sectors in technology adoption by the Department of Commerce in 2003, Web 2.0 is growing exponentially. PBwiki reports hosting over 250,000 education related wikis; Wikispaces reports that they have given away over 100,000 free wikis to K12 educators and they plan on donating 250,000 more; and Edublogs hosts over 100,000 education related blogs. And while these are statistics from some of the largest Web 2.0 service providers, they represent only a fraction of online applications within the education sector.

Web 2.0 refers to these simple, often free tools for adding content to the Web, but it also refers to systems that allow users to evaluate content. Tagging refers to the process of allowing users to apply key word labels to discrete bits of content. The service del.icio.us, for instance, allows users to tag Web sites such that del.icio.us community can bypass search engines like Google and instead search the Web using user-generated key words. This form of content organization has been dubbed “folksonomy,” a taxonomy generated organically by a community. Tagging is an essential feature of many Web 2.0 content sharing sites, like Flikr, a popular service for sharing photos.

Indeed this kind of convergence is one of the most common features in the evolution of Web 2.0 tools. User-generated videos from YouTube are embedded in wikis; podcasts are hosted by blogs, commerce sites like Amazon.com allow users to tag products and post reviews. Facebook attempts to serve as an individual’s one-stop Web 2.0 hub, allowing users to chat, post updates, blog, share links, host photos, share videos, coordinate events, share music, and so forth. As Web 2.0 develops, many features of the various platforms are converging and overlapping.

The development of Web 2.0 is also characterized by new innovations. Right now in America, one of the fastest growing Web 2.0 services is Twitter, which allows for micro-blogging. Users post, either online or through mobile phones, status updates of 160 characters or less. Individually, most posts are trivial. Taken collectively, they allow users to track the daily ebb and flow of another person’s life, creating a remarkable sense of intimacy and familiarity (Thompson, 2008). Twitter is now being integrated with Facebook and other tools, so that microblogging is just now entering the Web 2.0 milieu.

The ownership of these diverse spaces deserves careful consideration. Many of these platforms are created and managed by teams of volunteers who release their products under licenses like GNU or creative commons that allow others to share and build upon their achievements. Wikipedia is run by a non-profit agency funded by user donations, Wordpress gives away their blogging platform, and MediaWiki gives away a wiki platform. Other platforms are proprietary and for profit: Google owns Blogger and YouTube, Rupert Murdoch owns MySpace, and so forth. The transmission of data that enables these communications is made possible by telecommunications companies that are regulated by governments around the world. In many dimensions, the newly enabled communications of millions of users depend upon the infrastructure provided by corporations and governments, and the boundaries and possibilities of new communications will be negotiated by users, corporate interests and governments. Corporations may seek to constrain communications in ways that maximize profits and governments may seek to constrain communications in ways that maximize state control. Whether or not the democratic possibilities of Web 2.0 are realized depends a great deal upon the degree to which users can negotiate for freedom and autonomy within the networks created and controlled by established political and corporate interests.

The broad future direction of Web 2.0

The driving force behind Web 2.0, the desire to lower the costs of communication, will continue to be a force shaping the web in the decades ahead, and innovations in time-cheap communications are going to present a future full of new surprises. Three other trends at various levels will continue to act on and shape this driving force. First, new platforms will continue to emerge. Second, the functionality in platforms will continue to converge. Third, we should expect to see greater integration between Web 2.0 tools and handheld devices. Finally, we should consider the efforts to those who seek not to extend the Web 2.0 regime, but to transcend it.

Platforms

It’s hard to guess which web communication platforms are going to stick and which are going to fall to the wayside – the book has been pretty durable, the 8-track less so – but we can make some guesses. To step back and think broadly for a moment, platforms are essentially defined by their level of automation. Automation makes certain communication acts time-cheaper, but automation also acts as a constraint on communication forms. Blogs are highly automated. They take new posts and new comments, and they place them in chronological order. This means that making an online journal with collaborative comments is quite time-cheap, but it also means that it’s difficult to make a blog anything other than an online journal. Wikis, by contrast, are the blank canvases of the online world. Almost nothing is automated in a wiki, and so they have a tremendously flexible format which is much more time-expensive to manually design.

Blogs and wikis are two of the formats which seem to have a great potential to prove quite durable. The free, flexible nature of the wiki means that it will likely continue to be suitable for innovative new structural arrangements. The enduring nature of the journal across time and cultures suggests that blogs will long have a place. Likely developers will find new ways to make communication within these platforms cheaper and easier, but these durable platforms seem well-poised to endure.

Some of the more proprietary platforms are perhaps more vulnerable to replacement. Online social networks are probably going to persist in the decades ahead, but five years ago one might have predicted that MySpace would dominate in America, whereas Facebook has begun to very successfully compete broadly with MySpace, especially amongst the demographic of Americans with higher levels of education. As more adults join Facebook, it may be that youth look to escape to a new network (Friending your parents is very uncomfortable… not friending your parents even more so), and perhaps a new space will be born.

Undoubtedly new platforms will also emerge as people develop new ways to make certain forms of communication time-cheap. Some of these may be rather obvious in retrospect, like Goodreads, which allows readers to share lists of what they are reading, lists of their favourite books, and lists of the books on their to-read list. Others applications, like Twitter, may appear quite strange as they appear because they represent new forms of social communication.

Convergence

Virtually all wiki platforms have built-in discussion boards. The Wordpress blog editor has a built-in static web page creator and publisher. Facebook integrates seamlessly with Twitter and a 1,000 other applications. Podcasts can be distributed through blogs. Platforms which began as serving one particular function are increasingly being combined and woven into other platforms. Teens used to send instant messages through systems like AOL Instant Messenger, but increasingly chat online through integrated chat in Gmail or Facebook. In America, Facebook seems well posed to be the primary launching point to the Web 2.0 world for many Americans, and other services like the start page for Google Apps is competing for the same title of home base. Some of the clear distinctions which now exist among platforms may cease to exist as tools increasingly adopt the functionality of other tools.

Handheld devices

Gcast is a service that allows any phone user to dial a phone number, record a message, and have that message published as a podcast within minutes. Jott is a service that transcribes and emails or publishes phone messages. Twitter updates can be made and read by text message, email, or on the web.

As handheld devices develop more sophisticated interfaces, increased functionality, and the ability to transmit more information more quickly, it’s likely that handhelds are going to make Web 2.0 platforms increasingly portable. Right now the clunkiness of thumb pads, the small sizes of screens, and the low bandwidth of mobile phones are limiting their integration into Web 2.0 platforms. It’s not time-cheap to add an article to Wikipedia through your mobile if you have to type out a whole article with your thumb and can only read 20 words of it at a time on your screen. However, as developers overcome these hurdles, mobile phones and other handheld devices will increasingly become integrated into the Read/Write web. At some level, this will simply mean more communication, but we should also expect qualitatively different forms of communication to emerge as well.

Web 3.0 and beyond…

Predicting the “knight’s move,” the radical changes that will reshape social phenomena is always a difficult task, though in the realm of science and technology we at least have the advantage that researchers and developers who are working on new breakthroughs are toiling in plain sight. Tim Berners-Lee, for instance, one of the founders of the World Wide Web, has been working for some time on developing tools to allow a “Semantic Web,” or a version of the web where computers would be able recognize the meaning of data at some level (Berners-Lee, Hendler and Lassila 2001). For instance, search engines can currently find every web page where the word “cat” appears. Clever programmers can even get computers to recognize that the work “cat” appears so frequently with the word “pet” that those words probably have some relationship. Computers cannot however, know what cat means or figure out that cats are a subset of pets. In the Semantic Web, computers would be able to identify these types of relationships, and thus one could do a web search for the phrase “all the types of pets” and the computer would not merely search for websites with those exact words, but would search throughout the data of the web to find all of the data considered a subset of pet, and then return that data to the user. Such a web would dramatically increase the meaning-making capacity of computers, allowing humans to focus even more of their time and energy on higher order thinking tasks, just as search engines on the web have allowed humans to find massive amounts of information in much less time.

Web 2.0 across the sectors

No facet of modern life will remain untransformed by the innovations of the Web 2.0. That’s a strong claim, but in the face of the scope and scale of the social transformations wrought by Web 2.0, it increasingly appears to be a defensible one. Across nearly every sector of the world, Web 2.0 is changing the way people interact and relate.

Business

Web 2.0 tools are sparking two major changes in business practices: how employees collaborate, and how businesses interact with customers. At the MathWorks near Boston, MA, software engineers are designing their entire products on wikis. Programmers no longer email snippets of code back and forth as they attempt to create and debug new features. Instead, programmers post their work to a wiki, which allows the entire MathWorks engineering community ready access to the entire database of code for their products. At BestBuy, the sales force of “Blue Shirts” participates in an online social network called Blue Shirt Nation, where employees can share strategies, give feedback to management, react to new products and campaigns, and help to shape the overall direction of the company (Li and Bernoff, 2008).

These practices represent both new efficiencies and new relationships within firms, and as of this moment it’s not yet clear which of these innovations will prove transformative. New efficiencies produced by collaborative work environments may be merely useful or they may be essential. Can a consumer durable retailer which has not harnessed the collective intelligence of its sales force compete with one who has? We may find that in certain economic sectors harnessing collective intelligence is more important than in other places, or we may find that firms who can use new Web 2.0 tools to empower their employees consistently out-compete those who do not.

Online networks may also upset hierarchical corporate structures. Will online communities within firms represent a new avenue for employee advancement? Will the Best Buy sales rep with the highest numbers be passed over for manager in favour of another employee who made several critical contributions to Blue Shirt Nation? Will the MathWorks wiki allow the most creative, productive programmers to be identified and recognized for their work, rather than the project manager who compiles and presents the final project to executives? These new platforms may allow different kinds of talents – talents related to online networking, communication and collaboration – to be more highly valued in the work place. They also may allow for employees at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy to more easily bend the ear of those at the top, and the examples of both Linux development and the Toyota production system lend support to this hypothesis (Evans and Wolf, 2005). These flatter, more democratic, more meritocratic social organizations may allow firms to draw out the strengths of their employees with less regard towards their position in the organization.

Lowering communication costs is also likely to accelerate the pace of globalization and outsourcing. As it becomes increasingly easier to collaborate online, both asynchronously and in real time, firms can employ people around the world and have those teams work together. For developing countries, this represents an incredible new opportunity for nations that can build the infrastructure for people to participate in this phenomena. For developed countries, it means greater competition in the global labour market.

Web 2.0 tools are also changing the ways that firms interact with consumers. For one rather silly example, take the case of the American film “Snakes on a Plane.” When New Line Cinema published that title amongst their list of films in development in 2005, it captured the attention of a segment of film buffs on the internet. Perhaps it was the way the title succinctly captures the central conflict of the film; perhaps it unlocked some deep psychological tensions around flying in post 9/11 America. In any event, blogs about the film sprouted, fans started generating and sharing content about a film that had not even been created yet. Fans knew that Samuel L. Jackson was to play a lead role, and one fan produced a sound clip where he imitated Jackson saying “I want these motherfucking snakes off the motherfucking plane!” The clip went viral – it spread rapidly through social networks and outside traditional publication channels – amongst fans of this yet-to-be movie, and the fans demanded that the line be added to the movie. So the studio went back into production in order to add the line, which became the signature moment of the film.

That moment represents a powerful symbolic change in the relationship between producers and consumers. The fans were not the simple recipients of the movie; instead, they helped to design the film. They were co-constructors of the product, and through that co-construction not only did they improve the product (in a marketing sense, if not an artistic one), but they also felt a greater sense of investment in the product. These fans, with their blogs, fan sites, and media clips, became a free marketing arm for New Line, and produced a buzz around the movie that few campy B-movies can hope to achieve.

Web 2.0 tools allow many variations on these kinds of two-way communication amongst firms and consumers. At Snorg T’s, about 1/3 of their ideas for new t-shirts, sold over the internet, come from consumers. At threadless.com, consumers not only submit t-shirt designs but vote on the ones that they want the company to produce, market and sell. Companies as diverse as Dell and Stonyfield Farms use blogs to talk and listen to consumers (Scoble and Israel, 2006). Proctor and Gamble launched Beinggirl.com as a space for girls to talk with each other and with health care professionals about issues of relationships and sexuality, sponsored throughout by advertisements for beauty and feminine care products (Li and Bernoff, 2008). As I write this, JetBlue airways has just announced its first flight from its new terminal at JFK via Twitter, sending the message directly to its 6,000 followers on Twitter. In these conversations, firms not only have the chance to learn from their consumers, but also to communicate directly with them, unfiltered through the media. In the best of circumstances, firms can help consumers feel like partners in the life of corporate products; consumers become part of the team.

Looking towards the future, if all that corporations do with these tools is find new ways to sell their products, then that won’t constitute a significant change in the economic sphere. If companies, however, go further in terms of listening to consumers, towards building partnerships with them, towards responding to their concerns and ideas, then we may see new ways for the marketplace to better serve consumers. If firms discover that they can draw strength from the ideas of consumers, that they can grow by building partnerships from consumers, and that they are vulnerable to widespread, online criticism of consumers, then that may shift the balance of power in capitalist society from the producers towards the consumers.

An alternative future where producers simply use Web 2.0 as a new medium to share advertising and propaganda with consumers is equally imaginable. BeingGirl.com may develop as an open forum where girls have a chance to speak with each other and with professionals about the challenging issues of adolescence, and Proctor and Gamble may get some incidental benefits from fostering this open space. On the other hand, Proctor and Gamble can exert powerful editorial controls over the content on BeingGirl in order to manipulate conversations towards the celebration of P&G products and the positioning of young girls as deficient beings without those products. We have to expect that Proctor and Gamble only cares about the interests of young girls to the extent that those interests coincide with their fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder profit. In these corporate sponsored spaces, which include Blogger, Facebook, MySpace, and many others, users and corporations will negotiate the norms of each space, and in the best possible future these negotiations will result in consumers working with producers to create a better marketplace. In the worst possible future, producers will use online spaces as a forum for cynical advertising to penetrate ever more deeply into the lives of consumers.

Politics and the civic sphere

Those who research the emerging Web trends in society are going to spend a considerable amount of time unpacking the role of the internet and other communication technologies in the Barack Obama presidential campaign. The Obama campaign reached out to voters through a wide variety of existing web platforms. The campaign has pages and groups on a variety of social network sites, posts regular updates on Twitter (where Obama has 100,000 followers), posts videos on YouTube, uploads pictures from the campaign trail to Flickr, and participates in other niche platforms like Faithbase and BlackPlanet. After Obama’s victory, we have good reason to believe that Web 2.0 tools will be an established feature of political campaigns.

The Obama campaign built a proprietary online community of over 1,000,000 members called my.barackobama.com (myBO). Users at myBO could join groups based on states, neighbourhood or interests (like Tango dancers or air traffic controllers). They signed up to contact local undecided voters in their neighborhood and received “Walk lists” in seconds. Users could create a fundraising page which tracked their efforts at getting friends and family to donate to the campaign, and they could create their own blogs with which to share their thoughts with others. While myBO posed a number of strong constraints within the network in order to maintain their message and brand, they allowed remarkable freedom to users in creating their own blogs and fundraising messages. These messages were screened, and objectionable language was removed and led to users being banned, but on the whole the campaign allowed users to craft their own personal message of support in the service of a shared goal.

All of these messages were also shared outside the bounds of the official Obama network. In some cases, users shared the Obama message by posting Obama updates to their own social network profile, or sharing YouTube videos from the campaign by email. At the same time, Obama supporters also took ownership of his message and created their own groups and communication platforms. Many people individually created their own blogs or groups, like the Obama-Mama blog or the Facebook group “I have more foreign policy experience than Sarah Palin.”

These tools allowed the Obama campaign to achieve two objectives. First, they used communication tools to speak directly to millions of voters and potential voters without being filtered through the media. The decision to announce Obama pick for V.P. via text message at an early morning hour allowed the Obama campaign to send their message directly to the voters, rather than mediated through some kind of press release or press conference. Consider the costs of sending all of the words, images and videos distributed by the Obama campaign through a combination of media ads and direct mailing: it would be a staggering sum. The costs of transmitting these materials become entirely manageable using the web, and in fact, Obama volunteers and supporters absorbed much of the cost of those interactions.

The role of volunteers in sharing the message speaks to the second online objective achieved through Web 2.0 tools: getting a small army of grass-roots supporters involved in the campaign. The online tools dramatically reduced the cost of mobilizing huge numbers of volunteers and supporters. Those volunteers worked both through official channels, like those who volunteered to print out Obama walk lists, and through unofficial channels, like those who posted an Obama video to their social network profile or blog outside of myBO. The Obama campaign’s online efforts gave supporters an online stake in the campaign and even gave them some control over personally shaping their version of the Obama message. By sharing this stake, the campaign unlocked entirely new bases of small donors, of volunteers, and of new voters.

While the Obama campaign is certainly the most prominent example of online civic mobilization, many other examples exist as well. On February 12, 2003, the largest coordinated protest in human history occurred across the world in opposition to the Iraq war, where somewhere between 12 and 20 million people took to the streets (Bennett, 2007). The protest was organized in a matter of months, and online communication played a critical role. At www.350.org, activists are mobilizing people to demand action on greenhouse gas emissions and reduce atmospheric carbon down to 350 ppm. At 350.org people can join the movement, find out about upcoming actions, organize their own actions and spread the word. Facebook has an application where individuals can create profiles dedicated to causes, where people can invite their friends to donate to or join in an action or effort. These tools will play an increasingly important role in grass-roots action over the decades ahead.

Just as we could imagine two alternative futures for Web 2.0 tools in the economic sphere – one which enhanced consumer power and one which co-opted consumer energy in the service of corporate power, so can we imagine two futures for these new political media. Whether you believe that Barack Obama is The One, That One, or just the next one, one has to assume that he’ll be under constant pressure to use his online network as a tool for generating support for his agenda rather than as a medium for developing his agenda. If myBO becomes another media for the Obama administration to spread a centrally constructed message, then it becomes another instrument of elite political power. If, however, myBO morphs into my.americangovernment.gov, a space where citizens have the opportunity to contribute and collaborate on solving problems and speaking truth to power, then the democratizing power of Web 2.0 tools may indeed lead to a more democratic republic. Given the pressure on politicians to consolidate their power, one has to assume that the better future will only come about if the citizenry organizes to demand that it happen.

Journalism and the media are also being profoundly affected by the emergence of Web 2.0 tools. In some cases, new media are simply being integrated into old media. Many New York Times columns are also published as blogs, and readers can comment back on the blogs, and columnists can respond to those responses in future columns. Certainly this kind of dialogue happened with letters in the past, but the communication is now faster and at a greater scale. More importantly, anyone can now read almost all of the comments left behind by others, so nearly the entire communication stream is publically available. The editorial control over the “letters to the editor” is greatly loosened, so hundreds of comments are published rather than just a few letters. Anyone who is willing to avoid vitriolic personal attacks and foul or hateful language can have their say on the pages of NYTimes.com and dozens of other newspapers.

Web 2.0 tools also allow new journalism platforms to emerge outside of the traditional media. The Drudge Report and the Daily Kos are two examples of partisan blog networks providing political news and opinion outside of the traditional corporate journalism structure. Blogs that provide coverage of niches, like particular celebrities, trends, or market sectors, have proven to be particularly successful in finding readerships in the media marketplace. In some cases, this citizen journalism has proven to be a powerful check on the mainstream media, such as when bloggers discovered and then demonstrated that documents that Dan Rather used to criticize George W. Bush’s Texas Air Guard record were fabricated. In other cases, Web 2.0 tools have been the source of media stories, such as when Senator George Allen called a young Indian man a Macaca at a campaign event, a racial slur which was captured on video and published on YouTube for the media to pick up on. Web 2.0 tools have both allowed new voices into journalism, and they have created a new bank of user-generated media to inform journalism. Established media conglomerates will undoubtedly attempt to harness, control and profit from these new domains, but the ease of creating and publishing widely available media suggests that media consumers will have a far wider array of media choices in the future, and they will have more opportunities to interact with others in national and international conversations about news events.

Relationships and identity

Friend is now a verb. To “friend” someone is to solicit or accept an invitation from another person on an online social network that denotes that person as one of your friends. In this context, friends are not necessarily friends as in other contexts. Friends may be acquaintances from school or work rather than people who you choose to have a social, affectionate relationship with. Yet the power of these online friendships is that Web 2.0 tools can allow them to have a degree of intimacy that offline friendships may not necessarily have.

For instance, this past summer I took a group of students to India. While in India, I left new status updates from the road, and when I returned I posted a series of photo albums to my Facebook site. I have several very dear, close, offline friends who know nothing about this trip; we have not been in touch since then. I also have several acquaintances in my Facebook network who I have not spoken to in years, who I don’t feel particularly emotionally close to, who followed this expedition quite closely. If I run into them, they can ask about what it was like to cross the high pass at 16,000 feet in the India Himalaya or about my relationship with Lado, the Indian mechanic who helped us with our service project. In several important respects, my Facebook friends know the shifting landscape of my moods, activities, and journey through life better than some of my offline friends with whom I have close emotional bonds but only a weak sense of the contours of their current life. For those outside the world online social networks, it’s easy to imagine that Facebook friends aren’t real friends. But when I look at who understands my life right now, the question “who are my real friends?” becomes much more complicated. In a sense, I have a whole new category of friends with whom I share a whole new category of intimacy. Social capital theory gives us a robust framework to understand how these relationships work as weak ties (Putnam, 2000), but social capital theory in its present form does not necessarily account for the significance of the new levels of intimacy that I have development with my acquaintances. As online social networks transform our social landscape, fundamental and remarkably durable notions of relationships and identity may evolve.

For many young people especially, the online world now is a parallel social space to the offline world. Just as teenagers carefully cultivate an image in school, through dress, activities, friendships, and conversations, so do teens carefully cultivate a second image offline. In shaping their MySpace or Facebook page, teenagers carefully choose which photos of themselves to display, what books and movies to list as their favorites, who to accept and reject as friends, and what other information and images should adorn their “profile.” Just as students may express one identity in the classroom, another in church, and another on the basketball court, so students can experiment with new identities online. In many cases, the lack of instant social feedback from acts of identity-shaping may allow people to be bolder in experimenting with self-expression; you might be taunted immediately for wearing an Arsenal jersey in the halls of a Manchester high school, but you have some insulation from insults if you post a picture of Adebayor on your profile, at least until your online friends find you. Certain online spaces are specifically designed for this identity experimentation and role-play. James Gee, writing about video games, describes the capacity to create “projective identities” in virtual worlds like World of Warcraft or Second Life, where people can experiment with designing new identities for virtual representations, or avatars, of themselves (Gee, 2007). These games, which require communication not only in game, but through other mechanisms like guild sites, forums, wikis, and blogs, allow people to experiment with new identities in new domains.

Exploration of how these online networks are reforming notions of identity has only just begun, but as one example of the changing social landscape consider the notion of persistence. The mobility of modern life in the West has allowed many people the opportunity to “start over” with a new identity. High school kids go off to college, people change jobs, switch schools, move to a different town. Someone who tires of being the class clown in middle school can try to shape a new identity in a new high school; someone who was a chess nerd in high school can join a party fraternity in college. Part of what enables these new experiments is the chance to abandon an old identity. But what happens to the nature of these changes if people travel from one offline social world to another while maintaining a consistent online social identity? What does it mean to have a single Facebook page from middle school through one’s working life? Is one’s Facebook profile sufficiently malleable to allow significant changes in identity, or does the durable nature of one’s public, online identity constrain people’s efforts to experiment as someone new? Some initial research suggests that the complexity of privacy setting tools in Facebook restricts people’s ability to maintain old ties while entering new communities with different expectations, but we have much more to learn (DiMicco and Millen 2007). Answering these questions will be critical to psychologists and other social scientists, to educators and parents, and to young people in the years ahead.

Over time, the English language has developed such that “virtual” is the antonym of “real,” and if social scientists accept this opposition, they will miss some of the most important phenomena developing in modern social relationships. Relationships developed in virtual or online worlds are not pale reflections of “real” world phenomena. They are a new class of meaningful and profound interactions which researchers will have to consider seriously as they try to understand the evolving nature of society in a Web 2.0 world.

Education

On the slow pace of adoption

There is a subversive joke told amongst education technology advocates that if Rip van Winkle awoke today, he wouldn’t recognize or understand the work in an architect’s office where the drawings are done by AutoCAD, in a mechanic’s garage where computers run diagnostic tests, or at a retail counter where sales are made and tracked by computer. All of these places and interactions would be radically different from the world the Rip fell asleep in, but if Mr. van Winkle walked into a classroom where students were sitting in rows listening to teachers lecture by the blackboard, then Rip would finally feel right at home.

As Web 2.0 technologies reshape nearly every aspect of modern life, their adoption has been relatively slow within the classroom. “Relatively” needs to be put into perspective: three providers alone, PBWiki, Wikispaces, and Edublogs claim to host nearly half a million education-related blogs and wikis. In all likelihood, millions more are hosted on other large public services, on course-management systems like Moodle or Blackboard, on proprietary systems for particular schools, and through other means, though there is no certain way to count. So on the one hand, in terms of raw numbers we are seeing an exponential growth in the adoption of Web 2.0 tools in the classroom, and on the other hand we are seeing very little evidence that this adoption is penetrating normal classroom routines. Reconciling this tension will help us understand the present and future of these tools in the classroom.

Hypothesised benefits

Very little academic research has centered on Web 2.0 tools in education. From the literature that does exists though, one can unearth hypothesized benefits for using Web 2.0 tools in the classroom with students, which can be organized into four major categories. The first category involves increasing engagement. On the one hand, we have some evidence that by allowing students to publish in a public space over which they have some control and ownership, students are motivated by the chance to work in Web 2.0 environments. Several small studies and experiments suggest that students who write using these technologies write longer pieces, write more frequently, claim to take greater pride in their work, and claim to enjoy the process more (Cole, 2004; Dunleavy, Dexter, and Heinecke, 2007; Grant, 2006; Olander, 2007). Students enjoy the chance to use tools in schools that they use socially in the rest of their lives, and they enjoy the opportunities to connect and collaborate (Reich, 2008) . They are also pressured, usually in a positive way, to perform better when their work is public. They appreciate opportunities to connect with the world outside their classroom. At the same time educators also have observed that Web 2.0 tools allow increased participation in class discussions, since those who struggle to communicate orally have another avenue to contribute (Ellis, Goodyear, Prosser, and O’Hara, 2006; Reich, 2008).

Building on this increased engagement, Web 2.0 tools provide new avenues to teach fundamental skills, like writing, communication, collaboration, and new media literacy. One small recent study showed that students who blogged improved their writing skills more than students who completed assignments by hand or through word-processing (Roth, 2007). The author argued that these gains were largely connected to motivation, and while the sample of the study may be small, the results are suggestive if not conclusive. Another recent study showed that students may learn reasoning skills in online communication with their peers more than they learn such skills when modeled by adult instructors (Ellis et al 2006). The capacity of these tools to nurture collaboration skills has been noted by several authors (Reich and Daccord, 2008; Richardson, 2008) who argue that the communally-constructed nature of Web 2.0 spaces forces students to figure out how to work together to create final products. Several researchers have investigated the promises and challenges to use Web 2.0 tools to develop these kinds of collaboration skills (Armetta, 2007; Coyle, 2007). In addition to these established skills, other researchers, like Henry Jenkins at MIT, have noted that the proliferation of new media has necessitated learning a whole new set of literacies, like understanding distributed cognition and transmedia navigation, and of course it makes sense to study new media literacies in the context of new media platforms (Jenkins, 2007).

In addition to developing both old and new fundamental skills, students also need to rehearse for 21^st century situations. As noted above, businesses are adopting Web 2.0 tools at an astounding rate, and students in schools need to have access to the communication media that are at least similar to the types of environments that they will be expected to use in the future (Laurinen and Marttunen, 2007). In one specific example, several researchers have noted that most classroom writing instruction looks absolutely nothing like the kinds of writing that employees are expected to do in the work force. Collaborative writing where iterations are workshopped by multiple people using online media are the norm in many workplaces, whereas these practices are the rare exception in education (Garza and Hern, 2005). Researchers have also recognized that collaborative digital media is an increasingly important part of the civic sphere, both nationally and globally, and Civic Life Online (2008) provides numerous examples both of how people are organizing in the 21^st century to meet civic goals and some early efforts to ready students to participate in these new efforts (Bennett, 2007).

Underlying all of these proposed benefits is the notion that the normal routine of school life is insufficient for preparing students for the new labour force and civic sphere. As Levy and Murnane (2004) argue, computers are increasingly replacing many of the repetitive tasks that used to be performed by significant parts of the human labour force. As a result, schools need to prepare students with new skills where humans have a comparative advantage over computers, especially in terms of complex communication and critical thinking. Since Web 2.0 tools offer new mechanisms for teaching these critical skills which schools so often fail to teach, emerging Web tools can enlighten the critique of the contemporary state of education. The best Web 2.0 projects, which we will turn to in a moment, demonstrate the extraordinary capacity for communication tools to enrich our learning, especially in contrast to an educational system grounded in print technology and an industrial infrastructure. While technology may play a role in highlighting the needs for change, technology alone will not provide reform. As Prof. Barry Fishman has argued, “Technology needs school reform more than school reform needs technology” (Personal Communication).

The potential and reality of Web 2.0 tools

The best instantiations of Web 2.0 tools are extraordinary, and the bulk are, unfortunately, quite ordinary and quite well suited for fairly standard instructional models.

There are hundreds of exemplary examples of Web 2.0 projects (many of which can be found at edublogawards.com), and I’ll highlight just one here. The Flat Classroom Project of 2007, hosted at flatclasroomproject.wikispaces.com, was a collaboration amongst eight classrooms in America, Shanghai, Austria, Qatar, and India. Students in the classroom were divided into 10 teams of students from around the world in order to study the 10 world flatteners from Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat (Friedman, 2007). Each team took one of the world flatteners and explored its impact by creating a wiki page which included video, images, and collaboratively composed text. The videos were shot in one country and then “outsourced” to another for editing, so a student might film something in Qatar to be edited in America. The essays that followed the videos were written collaboratively, and the discussion pages “behind” the main project pages show the various project management, communication and teamwork skills that students needed to practice in order to successfully complete the project. In the process of designing the wiki page, students undertook a critical examination of an important phenomena and then worked together to create a multimedia performance of their understanding.

While no studies have looked widely across Web 2.0 tools, there is anecdotal evidence that this kind of project is a very rare exception to two normal states. The first normal state with Web 2.0 is failure. Of the hundreds of thousands of blogs and wikis created, most die on the vine. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as one of the advantages of Web 2.0 is that they are both inexpensive and time-cheap to create, and so one can fail repeatedly before finding a model that works. That said, these failed instantiations are not realizing any of the aforementioned hypothesized benefits. The second normal state for Web 2.0 tools are applications that fit neatly into standard, industrial models of education. In these states, a wiki might be used as an easy way for a teacher to create a website as a one-way delivery device for content, rather than a collaborative medium. Or perhaps a student creates a blog as a kind of online portfolio, but her writings are never published widely, never shared with others, or never commented upon by classmates. In a sense the blog has allowed the student to pass in her homework online, but none of the potentially benefits of publishing within a larger critical, collaborative community are realized. If these two states are indeed the norm, then right now Web 2.0 tools may offer tremendous potential for education, but this potential is not much realized.

There is also anecdotal evidence that the distribution of the use of these tools, sophisticated or not, is skewed towards wealthy, suburban communities rather than poorer rural or urban communities. In theory, free and simple Web 2.0 tools that can build learning communities within and beyond schools should be able to benefit a wide variety of students equitably. Indeed, under-resourced schools might plausibly even benefit disproportionately, since networked computing technologies can be used to bring a wide variety of intellectual resources into low-income communities, where higher-income communities can afford to bring more of those intellectual resources directly into the classroom. Unfortunately, this does not appear to be the scenario currently unfolding.

I hypothesize that the distribution of Web 2.0 tools is indeed uneven, and that schools that are more wealthy, more white, more selective, and more suburban are more likely to employ Web 2.0 teaching tools than schools where students are poorer, non-white, and from urban or rural communities. Though no empirical research has been done on this topic, my hypothesis has been shaped by anecdotal evidence from conversations with educators, online discussions amongst academic technology integrationists, and evaluations of renowned education-related wikis, blogs and social networks. At a first glance, it appears that new opportunities afforded by Web 2.0 tools are primarily available to those students with access to many other types of opportunities. Henry Jenkins (2007) has raised similar concerns around this “participation gap” between wealthy and middle class students with access to participatory online communities and working class students who are being left behind.

Moreover, I expect that there is not only a difference in the distribution of these tools, but qualitative inequities in their application. Researchers have found that instruction in poor, non-white, urban schools is dominated by didactic, teacher-centered forms of instruction, where white, suburban students enjoy more interactive, student-centered teaching (Diamond 2007). I believe that these inequities will extend into the digital domain, and that urban schools in low-income communities will use Web 2.0 tools in more teacher-centered, less collaborative ways than suburban schools in higher-income communities. Furthermore, it seems likely that this didactic instruction in under-resourced schools will be focused on training students on basic skills, and the more interactive instruction in wealthier school will involve nurturing students in the critical thinking and complex communication skills that are essential to the 21^st century (Levy and Murnane 2004). Thus in the absence of policy interventions, it may be that low-income students will have less access to educational experiences with Web 2.0 tools, and the experiences that they do have will be less collaborative, less empowering, and less relevant to the future needs of society.

Future scenarios for Web 2.0 in education

The picture painted above is a fairly gloomy picture of Web 2.0 in education: these tools have tremendous potential to nurture the skills that students will need for the 21^st century civic and economic spheres, and yet these tools remained largely under-utilized, especially in under-resourced environments. And without fairly dramatic intervention, there is no reason to believe that this will change in the future.

Educational institutions are conservative ones. In many systems, teachers are not fully professionalized, and very few systems have incentives that reward teachers for innovative instruction. A teacher who lectures at the front of the class gets paid the same as one who pours his heart into developing multimedia, cross-cultural collaborative projects. So classrooms prove remarkably resistant to change.

Changing the orientation of schools towards 21^st century skills and teaching methods would be hard enough, and it’s made even harder in America by standards-based instruction which directs schools to focus more on 19^th and 20^th century basic skills. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law forces schools, especially schools serving low-performing students, to focus on preparing students to take standardized tests in basic skills almost to the exclusion of every other goal. Within schools who feel threatened by the NCLB regime, there is a strong disincentive to focus on 21^st century skills that will not be measured by standardized tests. The principle at work in America and applicable across all contexts is that education regimes which measure success through standardized tests that demand performances of rote memory are unlikely to produce teachers who prepare their students for performances of 21^st century skill demonstration.

As a result of these disincentives, teachers who want to wisely incorporate technology into their instruction are something of a rarity, and they tend to appear in wealthy, suburban schools where the teachers and administrators face little threat of having any significant number of their students fail to pass state tests. As a result, students who already attend schools with a variety of resource advantages, enjoy the additional instructional advantages of using Web 20 tools to develop fundamental skills and rehearse for 21^st century environments, while their less well-off peers enjoy