I. The Rise of the Schooled Society

A quiet revolution has been afoot over the past 150 years that is under-appreciated and often completely overlooked, yet it profoundly influences our lives, shapes who we are, how we think and work, and what we value most.  Formal education – schooling from kindergarten well into adulthood at colleges and universities and other higher education institutions – transforms modern society in ways that were unimaginable at the beginning of the 20^th century.  The idea of a schooled society is precisely this: a society in which not only all children and youth attend long periods of formal schooling and adult status is mostly determined by academic outcomes, but also one where all institutions are increasingly influenced by the ideas, values, and norms originating out of education as a social institution.

In a very short time, human society all over the world went from providing only limited schooling for the masses while saving advanced education opportunities for small numbers of elite students, to schooling all children and youth.  The standard of how much schooling it takes for one to be considered an educated person has steadily risen with every new generation.  This is obvious from our own families’ educational history where completing secondary education for our grandparents was a major personal accomplishment, while most of our generation assumed that college was a very desirable, if not totally necessary, goal, much like many of our children see post-graduate training as a normal and not a particularly unique education aspiration.

At the most basic level it is very apparent that schooling has steadily pushed its way into lives all over the globe. Just fifty years ago one half of all Americans either had no schooling or had attended only primary school, while in just three short generations we have progressed to the point where almost every American adult has at least graduated from high school and over one half of American adults have gone on to colleges and universities. During the same period whole populations in poorer nations went from having no access to any schooling to widespread primary and secondary education.  Currently 80% of all humans aged 15 or over are able to both read and write a short statement about their life (UNESCO, 2003). This fact would have been hard to imagine just fifty years ago, and most likely it would have been plainly unthinkable one hundred years ago.

The triumph of the ideas behind the educational revolution transformed the world in just 100 years from a place where the vast majority of humans received little or no formal education, to one where it is deemed a worldwide crisis if full education for all is not achieved soon (UNESCO, 2003). And in just the last 20 years the public rhetoric shifted from one of education for all as a positive, if distant, potential to one of education for all as an absolutely essential world goal.

Yet, the education revolution is not only about bringing just basic education to all; many nations, wealthy and less so, are in the midst of an unparalleled growth of higher education for all. Following these trends out over the next fifty years, one can easily imagine a world where most people live and work in what can truly be called a schooled society.

The demographical dimensions of the schooled society are well known and have been documented in great detail. In most high-income nations, such as the UK, US, Japan, France, Germany and so forth, mass education has steadily expanded up the life course over the past 100 years. By the turn of the 21^st century the dimensions of education in the world are immense in terms of its recent growth, its claim to people’s time and effort, and its impact on their lives.  What is most salient about the education revolution is both its relative newness to the human society and the speed by which it grown.  As shown in Figure 1, which plots the total worldwide number of students enrolled in primary, secondary, and tertiary (ie higher education) schooling over the past 200 years worldwide, a short time anthropologically-speaking.  And, once started the rate of growth for each level of schooling rapidly becomes significant and sustained. Note also that over the first few decades of the 20^th century growth in primary enrollment takes off and by 1940 bursts into a logarithmic climb, and as primary schooling reaches large numbers of children 20 years later, enrollment in secondary schooling turns sharply up in the 1960s. New advanced sectors of education are spurred on by the growth of the subsequent sector. Demographically, going to school and attending for a considerable number of years is a new and massive change in behavior of children and youth, and supporting this endeavour is a new role for their families and communities.

Figure 1: Number of Students in Elementary, Secondary, and Higher Education        Worldwide  (Source: Schofer and Meyer 2005)

Since the early 1970s the third wave of the education revolution has unfolded as enrollment in higher education has grown substantially. For example, only about 500,000 students were enrolled in higher education institutions worldwide at the beginning of the 20^th century, representing a tiny fraction of 1% of college-age people, but by 2000, the number of tertiary students had grown to approximately one hundred million people, a number that represents about 20% of the relevant age cohort worldwide, and most of this growth occurred after 1960 (UNESCO 2004). In higher-income nations, it is now common for more than half of all youth to receive some post-secondary schooling, with numbers surpassing 80% in a few countries (UNESCO, 2004).  But, the expansion is not limited to the wealthy, industrialized societies; countries like Algeria, Kazakhstan, and Myanmar each now possess about as many post-secondary students as could be found in the entire world at the start of the century (Schofer and Meyer, 2005).

Providing widespread educational opportunity for nations’ populations is not only widely thought to be desirable, it is now approaching the status of a basic human right like nutrition, health care, and civil rights.  Following the post-WWII trend of greater involvement of multilateral agency involvement in assisting nations’ economic development, representatives from major agencies such as the United Nations, UNICEF, the World Bank, UNESCO in alliance with governments of most nations, and international non-governmental organizations  (INGOs) such as Oxfam and Action Aid gathered together at an international conference in Jomtien Thailand in 1990.  Not only did they once again declare that education is a basic human right, but they set forth a plan of action to make education universal worldwide – the Jomtien Declaration.  This process was updated and intensified in 2000 at a similar international conference on Education for All in Dakar, Senegal.  In each case the attendees of the conferences affirmed the need to have all children have access to quality education within a relatively short time frame for not only the good of nations, but also for the good of the worldwide society. And ambitious and clear steps to meet these goals are widely dispersed throughout the developing world. But the schooled society is far more than just the mechanical expansion of formal education up the life course for ever greater proportions of humans.  As an institution, formal education has come to be one of only a few dominating modern society, and this social development in the course of human society worldwide holds a number of central implications for the future.

How to Think about the Education Revolution?

In light of this sweeping educational revolution, there is an interesting paradox about schooling in modern society.  On the one hand, we attribute many powers to schools: teaching children to read, to understand mathematics and science, to practice and enjoying the arts, to memorize the historical development of a nation, and now even to know about the development of human society across time and place: these are all routinely thought of as what schools do to transform children into functioning adults.  But on the other hand, schooling is frequently portrayed as failing modern society in fundamental ways, leaving the educational revolution under-appreciated, and the wide dimensions of the schooled society have gone mostly unnoticed.  There is much discussion and hand-wringing over the problems with schools; great things are expected from them, but they seem never fully to deliver.  Here is one example of the dire concerns many have about the quality of modern schools; this one was made by the founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, at the National Education Summit on American Secondary Schools held on February 26, 2005:

America’s high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded – though a case could be made for every one of those points.   By obsolete, I mean that our high schools – even when they’re working exactly as designed – cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.  Training the workforce of tomorrow with the high schools of today is like trying to teach kids about today’s computers on a 50-year-old mainframe. It’s the wrong tool for the times.  Until we design them to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting – even ruining – the lives of millions of Americans every year.

Why this paradox of such high expectations for schooling yet such concerns about its supposed perpetual failure?  First, most people do not recognize the power by which mass schooling transforms society.  Second, many people, even professional educators and scholars of education, become overly fixated on specific parts of what schooling is supposed to do for society at the exclusion of perceiving its formable total impact.  Third, formal education is so ubiquitous in modern life that people rarely appreciate the dynamic way schooling has intensified over recent history and in so doing incorporated itself even deeper into our lives.  Fourth, most people limit their view of schools, colleges, and universities as “helping” institutions that only socialize (some say even oppress) and train our children to join society.

But contrary to these perceptions, in point of fact, schooling from kindergarten through higher education continues to be one of the major success stories of our times; far from a failure, it has transformed who we are, how we think about ourselves, and what we can do.  Interestingly, this fact often goes unappreciated by most in modern society, including professional educators and many social scientists.

But over the past few decades, a group of social scientists-mostly sociologists-have developed a new way to think about the effects of education on modern society that opens up a much wider appreciation of how education transforms everyday lives.  Armed with a new perspective known as neo-institutionalism, these researchers are undertaking exciting new studies outlining the contours of the transforming activity of sending all children to increasingly longer periods of schooling (eg Baker and LeTendra, 2005; Meyer, 1977) The overarching conclusion from these studies presents a vivid picture of how profound the effects of educating all people has been on modern society, and points to the path that the schooled society will likely take in the future.

To appreciate this new perspective, first consider the traditional notion of formal education’s role in society.  On an institutional level formal education is considered to be only a supportive and secondary institution that follows in form and content wherever society takes it.  Probably the most popular image is that of education following (too slowly as Mr. Gates and others would have it) the changing demands of work in particular, and changing societal complexity in general.  Seen this way, schooling is an institution primarily limited to the training of individuals for jobs and the socializing of individuals for a particular society.  The traditional notion is that formal education reproduces society, changing only as society changes at the hands of various external forces.  This image is depicted in the top panel of Figure 2, where schooling only socializes students through teaching curricula and credentials them for adult positions, while the institutional unidirectional influence flows from society to schooling.

Figure 2: Two Models of Education’s Relationship with Society

A neo-institutional analysis turns this traditional notion on its head by arguing that an accounting of the full impact of the education revolution finds that there is much evidence to show that society has come to be more of a reflection of the institution of education rather the other way around. This new image of education and society is one in which formal education is a successful primary institution, so successful in fact, that over the past 50 years it has come to dominate many other institutions such as the family and child rearing, the workplace and ideas of human capabilities, politics and citizenry, and even highly personalized domains like the definitions of success and failure in life (Baker, forthcoming, a).

The lower panel in Figure 2 depicts this perspective with education as a primary institution in the construction of society.  While education continues to educate and credential individuals for roles in society, the institutional influence flows from schooling to society.  Over the course of Western society, in large part because of the rise of the Western university, as education came to play a larger role in creating central ideas and beliefs of modern society, it won significant legitimacy to educate individuals.  In turn, educational achievement became central to individuals’ social status.  This dynamic legitimacy has expanded and intensified over the course of the education revolution to the point where, along with effects on individuals, formal education generates new ideas about people, new privileged human capacities, new ideologies about knowledge and its generation, new social, including occupational, positions, and so forth (Meyer, 1977; Young, 2008).  The educational revolution produces what might be called a “schooled consciousness” promoting a culture of universalistic values, human empowerment, scientific knowledge, and rationality, not only at the individual level, or even at the level of aggregated individuals, but at an institutional level.

This perspective makes the strong case that schooling, as it has been practiced over the past 150 years, is far more than a preparatory exercise for youth, merely following where the technological and social demands of society take it.  Rather, the educational revolution has constructed, for better or worse, most of the dominant ideas, beliefs, and human capabilities that underpin human society as we know it at the beginning of the 21^st century.  This is how best to think about formal education and its possible future impact on society.

It should be cautioned however, that because of the widely Pollyannaish expectations about schooling noted above, discussion about a schooled society is frequently misinterpreted to mean that all things good result from more schooling and its greater role in the definitions of contemporary culture.  On the contrary, there are a number of arguments that start with the assumption that schooling is mostly oppressive (see Young, 2008) for a review and important critique of this line of thinking about schooling). And of course, from schooling used in fascist to apartheid societies over the 20^th century, there are a number of well-known extreme examples of educational oppression.

Interestingly though, most schooling-as-oppressive-always arguments presume a traditional perspective of schooling as described above: to the degree that a society is oppressive so is its schooling as it “prepares” people for the oppressive social order.  In other words, schooling reproduces and even validates existing social inequalities. But the social reproduction argument misses the point that schooling as a social institution constructs society.  Seen this way, schooling, if it were truly as oppressive as some argue, would have to be the root of oppression.  Some have tried to make this case of course (see Bowles and Ginits, 1976, for the US and Willis, 1981 for the UK), but by in large these have failed to account for the actual historical record of schooling and social class in most industrial nations (Baker, 1999).  And as many studies of worldwide, mass schooling and the western style university show, formal education curricula, even in oppressive societies, constructs and spreads an explicit version of human social justice, democratic values, and human universalism that runs counter to most of the extreme forms of social oppression (eg Fiala, 2006).  Hence there are many well-known incidents of suppression of intellectuals and draconian control over schooling to limit its liberating influence in many politically oppressive nations (see for one example from Germany Baker, Kolher and Stock, 2007).

Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that the schooled society powerfully creates social pressure to conform to its logic and punishments for those who do not or cannot conform.  Like all social orders that increasingly come to be dominated by a few key institutions, the schooled society shapes normative restrictions. Anyone who is close to an educationally failed child, or was one himself, knows the pain and frustration of not doing well in school.  In the schooled society, a youth’s image of their future becomes dim when performance in school, for whatever reason, is not successful. And this is far more than just in the technical issue of grades and test-scores: failure in school reflects upon the whole of the individual and remarkably even spills over negatively onto his or her supporting family.  So too as the schooled society intensifies, non-academic types of skills and ideas about human capacities become less privileged and less developed.

The Future of the Schooled Society

There are two scenarios about how the schooled society will proceed that predict diametrically opposed futures.  Mostly along the lines of the traditional image of education and society, the first scenario is by far the most popular one among pundits, casual observers, and often educators alike, but it is far less likely to occur than the second scenario.  Therefore, after a brief description of each, the educational implications of only the more likely second scenario are discussed.

Scenario 1 The Over-education Scenario:

This future scenario predicts that:

The education revolution has now reached its highest point and will wind down over the next three decades into a stasis of relatively little upward expansion of education and a reduction of education’s supremacy over social positioning. Spending upwards of 12-16 plus years in school reaches natural limits of the life course and foregone wages.  Most of the educational expansion of the last forty years is a process of educational inflation, where new degrees are required for the same jobs.  This has resulted in over-educated populations that are economically and socially inefficient and perhaps even dangerous to social cohesion, as individuals who are over-educated will develop unrealistic expectations for jobs and status in adult life that will not materialize.

Also, inflated schooling “dumbs-down” education in order to accommodate the influx of large segments of the population flooding into higher reaches of formal education that are not qualified, not motivated, nor very academically talented.  Other than relatively basic skills of numeracy and literacy, schooling does not add much that is usable, or not otherwise trainable on the job.  Runaway credentialism emerges when an educationally hollow status competition takes over the expansion of formal education.

With just subtle variations, the over-education scenario has been predicted as our imminent educational future virtually ever since the schooled society took off in the 1960s.  Under book titles such as The Diploma Disease, The Great Training Robbery and The Credential Society many predicted that over-education would be a major social problem and educational expansion would evidentially grind to a halt (Dore, 1976, Berg, 1971, 2003; Collins, 1976; also see Bowles and Ginits, 1976.  This was a particularly common forecast in the UK and in nations where a colonial past left a British type of education system (Dore was an influential British observer of education and national development) and in the more aggressively expanding American system (Bowles, Ginits, Berg, and Collins are American scholars) as higher education enrollment rates started to climb – surely the education revolution was going to die at the university’s gate.

The usual policy implications of the over-education scenario is to somehow save education from itself by imposing tighter linkages between formal schooling and jobs, revive vocational education, maintain greater control over testing and admission standards to university, and belief in what was once called “manpower planning” of a centrally guided education and jobs system.

Scenario 2 Continued Educational Expansion and Intensification of the Schooled Society:

This future scenario predicts that:

Early, and persistent, predictions of an approaching over-education future were wrong – in fact, they were spectacularly wrong.  So much so, that growth of the schooled society into the future and its continued construction of much of our culture is very likely.

The evidence that Scenario 2 is more likely to occur in the future than Scenario 1, in that for each predicted part of the over-education scenario much the opposite has occurred.  Briefly, there are five sub-predictions that never materialized, and what did happen in each case is more in line with an expanded and intensified schooled society.  The evidence below is mostly from the US, but it should be noted too that for a number of historical reasons, the political economy of American schooling has tended to herald each new wave of the education revolution and its ensuing spread worldwide, often even changing long standing educational traditions in the UK and other nations of Western Europe (Baker and LeTendre, 2005).

Failed Prediction 1: Natural limitations on the amount of the life course people will spend in formal education will eventually retard educational expansion as the main engine of the schooled society.

People continue to seem quite willing to gain ever-greater amounts of education, even foregoing wages.  Life course limits are pushed aside by the spread of the logic of “life-long education.”  What were once advanced degrees for a very small population are increasingly expanding to meet demand by larger segments of populations propelled by mass education at lower levels. For example, as shown in Figure 3, both enrollment in all graduate programmes and completion of master degrees (ie post the usual 4-year baccalaureate) have increased by substantial amounts since the 1970 in the US.  Furthermore, from just 1970 to 2004 the growth rates among Americans completing a masters and Ph.D. degree is 140% and 50% respectively. And similarly, professional degrees, such as law, medicine, dentistry, have increased by over 100% over the same period. And while this trend is occurring in the U.S., it will most likely rapidly spread through many national systems of higher education.

Figure 3. Growth Trends in University-Graduate Study in the U.S. 1970-2004

Failed Prediction 2: Educational expansion will have to be limited in the future as more people reach advanced degrees and the end of the structure of formal schooling as we know it.

There are recent new patterns of educational expansion occurring in the US as more people seek multiple university degrees. For example, the US Department of Education followed a nationally representative sample of 1992-93 B.A. completers over the following ten years.  Four out of ten enrolled in some graduate study during the decade, and one fourth of those enrolled in multiple graduate degrees of which half were for two or more masters in different disciplines (US Department of Education, 2005). Among B.A. degree-holders from private research universities, where most of the spectacular success of American research universities has been (see below), over one half of B.A. completers enrolled in graduate programmes and over a fourth of these enrolled in more than one degree programme at some time during the ten year span.  Similarly, large numbers of B.A. holders envision themselves as completing a graduate degree or even two sometime in their future; and, the US study reports that at the time of the B.A. completion a full 85% expected to undertake graduate training over the ensuing decade.  Of course this did not happen (yet) for about one-half of these individuals, but the implications are clear-graduate training at university is becoming more normative with each decade, and the growth of graduate degrees and multiple graduate degrees is an outgrowth of this.  And of course there has been a worldwide expansion of adult access to additional formal education and this will likely continue into the future.

Failed Prediction 3: There will not be much job up-grading as more of the labor force enters with more education, thus leading to an educationally hollow and unsustainable credentialism.

There is an emerging research literature indicating that the schooled society has had a profound impact on many dimensions of the workplace and job content technology, including how it is incorporated into work. Largely on the pages of the Quarterly Journal of Economics over the past decade and one half, economists of labor and national development have developed an insightful set of empirical findings about the relationship among education of workers, technology, and the organization of the work inside firms.  Over and over these studies report that education influences the world of work more than the other way around.  What once was the standard assumption that as each generation attains more formal education there is little true job upgrading has been buried by these recent studies.

Failed Prediction 4: Over-education leads to future social unrest and great dissatisfaction with schooling in general.

There is no evidence that this most dramatic of predictions of the over-education scenario ever happened in any part of the world as mass schooling and higher education rolls on.  And there is some systematic analysis that verifies this. A representative example is the comprehensive study by Val Burris who finds in a 1983 analysis of a large nationally-representative sample of working Americans no substantial differences between people who are over-educated for their jobs and those who are not across their stated job satisfaction, political radicalism, political alienation, unionism, and allegiance to an achievement ideology.

Failed Prediction 5: Educational Expansion “dumbs-down” education, making it less relevant to changing human capacities in the future.

This is a common prediction that is hard to test, but there is emerging evidence to suggest if anything, mass education has made schooling far more demanding on a cognitive level than was the case at the beginning of the last century. For details see Consequence II below.

II. Two Consequences of the Schooled Society for the Future of Knowledge, Creativity and Communication

If scenario 2 is the more likely to occur in the future, what are some of the main educational consequences and policy implications?  Two are described here, one for higher education, and the other for all levels of education starting from the very beginning of schooling.

A.  The Future of Knowledge Production: The Super Research University’s Knowledge Conglomerate

The advent of the super research university (hereafter, super RU) and its knowledge production conglomerate, primarily in the US, over the past several decades is a stunning development of the schooled society with major implication for the future of society (Mohrman, Ma and Baker, 2007).  An intensification of a number of unique qualities of the Western university has resulted in a small, but growing, number of institutions with the capacity to produce unprecedented levels of science, technology, and knowledge about human society.  Sometimes identified as “world-class research universities,” these institutions are, for better or worse, leading the establishment of an emerging model of the university that is rapidly becoming the accepted standard by which institutions will undertake graduate training and research. For better or worse, the ideas driving the super RU are rapidly forming into a pervasive normative model for the university throughout higher education worldwide with major implications for knowledge, science and technology production into the future.

So too, the rising super RU model, emulated by so many universities supported by the schooled society, has set the foundation for the much discussed knowledge society, and its variations such as Richard Florida’s creative class and Robert Reich’s symbolic analysts.  In a dynamic interplay between knowledge production and the expansion of knowledge domains, the university has played a key role.  It is the main arbitrator of knowledge, not just in the form of science and technology, but also in terms of business, social science, and traditional humanities (Frank and Gabler, 2006).  The knowledge conglomerate has also worked to expand the range of occupations assumed to require a university degree. This is counter to the much touted claim in the early1990s that universities’ knowledge production system, Mode 1 science as it was known (eg Gibbons et al, 1994), would become outdated and give way to a mostly a non-university based new system, called Mode 2 knowledge production.  But the original prediction about the decline of knowledge production at universities did not happen; while non-universities organizations got into the knowledge production process, the super RU has actually increased the university’s share of an expanding knowledge production conglomerate (Geiger, 2004).

For example, here is how some leading neo-institutional analysts of the university and its role in the schooled society describe this institution power of the university:

The university – while inefficient at preparing people for specialized roles, in comparison to direct role-training arrangements – is extremely well positioned to support precisely such generalized notions.  Students learn – and society itself learns – that all the specialized and professionalized roles of contemporary society are fundamentally based on universal scientific knowledge and rationality, and that with schooling, ordinary persons can be transformed to possess the relevant competencies (Meyer et al, 2007, p203)

Briefly listed, the growing literature on these super RUs identifies a set of defining characteristics that most observers agree upon (eg Geiger, 1993; Mohrman, Ma and Baker, 2007; Baker, forthcoming, b) including: Research Intensive; Transcending global mission; New Knowledge for the Good Society; Decline of the Traditional and the Rise of the new Professoriate; Recruitment of Academic Core in National and International Markets; Greater Internal Complexity; Denser Networks of Universities and Steeper Competition Worldwide; Extreme Costs and Mixture of Funding.

By and large, the rise of the super RU stems from the American higher education experience with mass education and a norm of universal access. The muscular approach to knowledge generation stems from a broad consensus in the US (and everywhere else too) around the idea that university research is crucial to economic global competitiveness (Geiger and Sa, 2008).  Over the past several decades, three major transforming trends in higher education are unfolding that are widely discussed, yet only rarely in relationship to one another.  In fact, for many higher education observers, these three trends represent opposites within formal education, that on the surface seem to create more conflict than harmony within the university. One trend, often divisively debated, is the rapid growth of the private sector of higher education across most nations.  The second trend, often considered pedestrian, is the unprecedented expansion and massification of higher education in not only wealthy nations such as the United States and those in Western Europe, but in almost all nations as well.  The final trend, often celebrated, is the rise and flourishing of super RUs; mostly in the US, but increasingly now as a model aspired to by many research universities throughout the world.  What is not often appreciated about these three trends is that at their root they are related, even symbiotic, to the point that each likely would not be happening if it were not for the other.

An appreciation of the underlying relationship among these three seemingly separate major transforming forces in higher education develops a fuller picture of the institutional dynamism behind the growing legitimation of the university and its role in shaping the schooled society now and into the future.  Frequently these three trends are assumed to be in some kind of zero-sum competition with each other, but this underestimates the institutional power of the educational revolution and the role of the university in its development.  Also such an underestimate can lead to a policy environment in which universities and ministries of education around the world actually inhibit the development of mass higher education, private institutions, and efforts to reach for the full capacity of research universities to generate new knowledge and train the next generation of scientists and scholars.

These three trends are bound together in the case of American experience with higher education.  This has always been so, but recently the dynamism among these trends has intensified to an unprecedented level with clear implications for the future.  Often this intensification of private funds within American RUs is seen as a decline in the strength of universities as an institution, but in fact the very opposite case – that private funds reflect the growing overall strength of the university – can be made.

Focusing on the American case to predict the future of knowledge production in universities worldwide is not meant to imply that all nations must follow this pattern, nor is it intended to be a statement about political or cultural hegemony.   Rather, it is justified by the fact that, for better or worse, the US has been the world leader in the institutional changes represented by mass education and the coming of the schooled society.  This is also not to say that how the American school system is operationalized in practice is necessarily the world leader (on a number of criteria, it is not), rather what comparative research on education change clearly shows is that over the past few decades there is increasing worldwide isomorphism among national school and higher education systems, and many of the ideas, goals, values and beliefs behind this process originally stem from the American experience with formal education, particularly since the 1960s (eg Baker and LeTendre, 2005).

How then to think about these three phenomena together?

Geiger traces the dimensions of science and technology development in US universities over the past half century and his cogent analysis of basic research production shows precisely the enhancing of the societal mission of the university (Geiger, 1993, 2004).  Historically the rise of the “knowledge production conglomerate” in American research universities consists of a robust funding situation plus existing trends in the organization of university research and scholarship aimed at interdisciplinarity, the proliferation of research institutes, and ‘raising the bar’ in faculty hiring that are at the heart of the super RU model.  This aggressive approach to knowledge generation that ensues from this feeds into the idea that university-based, or university-influenced, research is crucial to economic global competitiveness.  It is a short jump from this image of the role of the university to society-wide consensus that the university is a leading institution for the good of society.  This very image of the American university, as it transforms itself into a super RU, is widely evident in the American culture.

This is often missed as many observers of RUs assume that privatization and public funds are in a zero-sum relationship.  And indeed a superficial reading of trends can lead one to this conclusion.  It is true that the American federal government’s share in funding research (once the source of most university-based research) declined dramatically over the last twenty years from almost one half to just over a fourth of the nation’s total expenditures on R&D.  And what gained proportionally during the same time were privatized sources, which now fund 70% of all American R&D.  Furthermore, the funding for basic research, which is predominately carried out in universities, grew only from about 14 to 18%.

What goes unappreciated though is that both public and private funds have flowed into American universities as a consequence of this broad societal consensus around mass higher education, and therefore university-based research has increased proportionally (Geiger, 2004). Overall growth of all American R&D from 1980 to 2000 kept pace with the rapid growth of science and technology that the world has seen since the 17^th century.  Combined university-based and non-university-based R&D (basic research and expensive technology development) spending from 1980 to 2000 more than doubled in constant dollars from about $115 to $248 billion.  And importantly, within this rapidly expanding R&D climate, the university has held its share at about one-half of all basic research.  While federal (ie public) support to American universities has declined, it has been replaced from private economic sources, so that overall academic funding as a share of GDP grew by 50% in just twenty years, to an amazing $28.2 billion in 2000.

Also, the rise of the model of the super RU (private and public) and expanding access to higher education are both large-scale trends that reflect underlying models of education and its role in society that in turn are transforming higher education.  To see this argument, it is useful to consider the context from which the super RU model originated.  As pointed out, the US has the highest number of universities with the characteristics described above.  These are universities that produce considerable amounts of new knowledge across many fields (eg out of the top 10 universities worldwide with the highest citation rates per faculty size rates, 8 are US institutions, and of those 5 are private).  And many other American universities are above the world average in citations.  Similarly, out of those universities worldwide that can generate the enormous level of research funding, by far most are American, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1:  Top Ten Universities in Citations/Faculty Size

Source: The Times Higher Education Supplement, October 6, 2006

But the usual take on the American case – private money, low central control, and high tolerance for between-institution inequality (in part a function of inequalities produced by mixing private and public funding sources) – is not the root cause of why so much of the super RU model stems from the American experience.  In other words, the super RU is not just the product of the historically unique private section of American higher education.  It is not just that the super RU model is an expensive one to pursue, requiring a wealthy society.  Nor that private money is now a substantial source of funding in the U.S.  Nor even that many super RUs are privately controlled.  While these factors certainly have enhanced the development of the super RU model, they are not at its root cause.  Instead, the cause is found in the way in which American society has generated widespread societal support for higher education, institutionally led by the research university, which includes private universities and private support for significant parts of public universities. In other words, formal education in the US has been an early leader in the movement towards universal access to higher education and all that such an idea includes (Trow, 2005).  Instead of assuming that mass access to higher education, the super RU model, and the role of private funds are mutually exclusive, zero-sum forces, what the American case illustrates is that in reality these three trends have significantly supported one another in the past and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future.

It is true that this fundamental symbiotic relationship is not the product of some central plan, instead it grew out of a unique set of historical conditions.  The effects of which have become more obvious as the model for the American super RU becomes attractive to many other nations leading higher education there to mimic certain aspects – including faculty working conditions, competitive-based governmental support for research, a large private sector basis – as well as the idea of substantial private funds within the system.  But what is frequently overlooked in these efforts is the exceptional societal support the US has been able to generate for education in general and higher education in specific-both public and private.

American society has achieved this for essentially two reasons: first, through a widely comprehensive system of public (and to a lesser degree private) secondary education graduating youth with the aspirations and expectations for more education, and second through a relatively open and comprehensive higher education system made up of both public and private universities and many small private colleges.  This has lead to the belief in American society that the university, and particularly the super research university, is not an elitist or esoteric enterprise; instead, it is perceived to a remarkable degree as a democratic and useful institution.  The fact that so many Americans attend some institution of higher education and have deep connections to these institutions in all of their many types, translates into wide societal support (ie public and private monies) for the costs of super research universities, even if only a small proportion of Americans will attend, or has attended, one of these highly selective institutions.  As with the expansion of mass and comprehensive (ie non-stratified) elementary and secondary education, the US has over the last century led the way in mass higher education with the idea that more and more types of people can develop as individuals (and not just as workers) through extended formal education (about 60 to 70% of American youth with a secondary school degree enroll in some type of higher education).  At the same time, what the research university is thought to do for American society further legitimates the expansion of education for all. Also, private universities and private aspects of public universities have played a direct role in mass education.

The tremendous level of private support for higher education in the US is not only a reflection of rising tuition, it is also a reflection of the way that higher education in general, and universities in particular, are thought about in the US. The lack of a state controlled exclusive set of universities and other institutions of higher education in the US has led to robust and broad private support of individual institutions, and also of the entire sector to a degree.  Certainly rising tuitions and private shares of funding is a trend to be concerned about and in some ways is a product of falling public funds for higher education.  But the idea of societal support is broader than just the shifting split between public and private funds.  In the US overall, the pie continues to grow for higher education.

The 19^th century American land-grant model of the research university laid the groundwork for the future of American higher education, and in many ways perhaps also the future of higher education globally. Here are all of the forerunners to the new ideas that now drive the super research university in terms of the symbiotic relationship between university and society, and joining together several strands of ideas into one institution for the first time.  Scientific knowledge, rational social progress, human empowerment, and universalistic values become embedded within the authority of the university, and this authority, based on an intensification of these ideas in the postmodern world, drives the current support of the super RU model in the U.S. (see also Meyer et al, 2007).  Also, every land-grant university, even though they are public, incorporates significant private funds, from tuition to research collaborations with private ventures, to huge alumni giving of private gifts (money), to lucrative deals trading universities’ logo for revenue from private sports apparel firms.  This is not to pass moral judgment on the American super RU and its privatization; there are clearly positive and negative implications of the model, and thoughtful critics on both sides.  Rather, the point of the American case is that one way to think about the growing private higher education sector worldwide is that it is partially driven by the rise of societal support for the super RU from mass education and now mass higher education.  And that in turn, once private support for higher education begins to flow and becomes normative, it feeds into the overall growing institutional power of higher education.

The main policy implication for the future of the UK system is not necessarily to copy the details of the American system – in fact, attempts to do so in other nations have not worked very well.  Instead the message to take away from here is to focus on factors that increase overall societal support for the knowledge production function of universities.  And given the logic of the schooled society, the best way to do so is educationally, not through public relations campaigns and other trivial methods.  In other words, opening up access to higher education and lowering early barriers to secondary education leading to higher education generates societal support.  If universities remain mostly elitist, this will limit their ability to generate the considerable financial resources needed to compete as super RUs, or world-class knowledge producers in the future.  The old model that elite institutions will train the elite knowledge producers and this can be sustained by special public funding is rapidly breaking down.

B. The Future of Knowledge Acquisition: The Rise of Academic Intelligence and the Cognitive Revolution

Formal education is the only institution in modern society that on a consistent basis has the legitimate power to organize all accepted types of knowledge into acceptable format and determine valid truth claims, and specify who and when people have access to learn these new fields (Young 2008). And if this power were not enough, for the first time in human history formal education defines and almost single-handedly focuses society on one particular capability that all normally developing humans must have.

Mass schooling has produced and widely distributed a uniquely new definition of intelligence, and in a relatively short time made it universally accepted as not only useful, but essential to being a fully developed individual ready to participate in modern society.  As never before, schooling through its everyday activities has created a new model completely based on cognitive skills about what is important for effective human development and performance. What might be best described as “academic intelligence” is perhaps, among all of the significant impact of the schooled society, the cardinal institutional product of mass education. Academic intelligence can be defined as: those cognitive skills needed to do abstract reasoning, problem-solving, higher order thinking, multiple perspective taking, and effortful thinking.

All forms of formal education increasingly narrow human capabilities towards cognitive performance.  With the development and flourishing of academic intelligence, such skills as mental problem-solving, effortful reasoning, abstraction and higher-order thinking, and the active use of intelligence take center stage while pushing off more traditional academic skills such as recitation, disputation, memorization, formalistic debate, formulae application, accuracy, and authoritative text reading and exegesis.  Cognitivism has become the overarching epistemological theme of modern education, and as the schooled society deepens there is evidence that cognitivism continues to intensify in its importance.

Exactly when academic intelligence emerged as the main objective of mass schooling is hard to pinpoint, but there is good evidence that it has intensified over the last half century, and in so doing it pushed aside other older objectives of formal education.  Academic intelligence retains some vestiges of both old classical education and the spirit of vocational training, but it emerges out of a type of dialectic process between these former goals of education, and as such is a synthesis that is quite different from a simple compromise or watering-down of the two.  Academic intelligence is what children throughout the world must learn to be a “fully-developed human.” Note the change in terminology of the objective of schooling from the older phrase “well-educated” with its implications of mastery of content versus the ontological implications of the contemporary phrase “fully-developed.”  In so doing on a mass basis, the educational revolution has made much of the traditional epistemological foundation of schooling – classical intellectualism and vocationalism – obsolete.

A good example of the trend towards academic intelligence in not only what is presented in schooling, but also what becomes defined as the way to generate new knowledge in society is the one hundred year evolution of mathematics curricula.  A recent study (Baker et al, forthcoming, c), undertook a cognitive assessment of primary school mathematics textbooks (as a proxy of the curricula in the localized US system) over the 20^th century.  Two of the major trends found illustrate the point here.  First, contrary to the notion that mass education “dumbs down” curricula, the mathematics in textbooks has, particularly since the 1960s, included more advanced material at earlier grades.  And two, most germane to the argument here, the textbook material from the 1960s onward increased all types of problems that require the kinds of skills that make up academic intelligence.  As the cognitive demand of the curricula increases, all students are required to try to think mathematically and reason about the subject in ways that students early in the century were never asked to.  The model of young student learning mathematics in the 1940s and 1950s was that of the careful, accurate and tireless calculator, and by the late 1960s on the model was as a “little” mathematician.

A second illustration of the consequence of increased focus on academic intelligence in the schooled society is the case of increasing IQ across generations of adults. Populations of humans living in what are now the wealthier of nations have gotten considerably “smarter” over the course of the 20^th century and continue to do so (Flynn, 1987).  This once little-known phenomenon, called the Flynn Effect, is appreciated by aficionados of the study of intelligence, although pop-sociology has recently spread this fact to a wider audience.  When psychometricians compare performance on tests of IQ (intelligence quotient) over the last century they find that the average person in a generation scores higher than the average person in the preceding generation.  In fact, the whole distribution of scores has shifted upwards over the past 80 years with each succeeding generation.

As shown on the Figure 4, when raw scores are compared over history a growing average IQ trend is evident to an amazing degree; compared to the average person in 1900, the average person now scores two full standard deviations above this at 130.  Successive generations have been gaining about 15 IQ points over the preceding generation; while 15 IQ points may not seem like a lot, it represents going from mere average intelligence to superior intelligence, and of course people with superior intelligence (120 plus) in the preceding generation are matched by people in the succeeding generation with exceptional scores (135 plus).

Figure 4. Rise in IQ, Wechsler Tests and Stanford-Binet,  1932-1992

There are two other qualities of the trend of growing IQ, both of which may be a function of the educational revolution.  First, all the evidence uncovered so far indicates that the Flynn Effect has occurred only in nations that have been economically developed and had early and sustained mass education for some time, such as Japan, Western European countries, and the US and Canada (Flynn, 1987).  And second, the part of IQ that has had the most dramatic historical increases is what is informally called “fluid IQ.”

When psychometricians think about intelligence, they often clump IQ abilities into two large sets of capabilities.  One set, known as fluid IQ, is made up of our ability to solve novel problems through planning approaches to complex tasks (executive functioning), keep important facts in mind as we solve problems (working memory), process information in an effective way (inhibitory control), shift our mind’s attention to parts of problems in an effective manner (attention shifting), and understand spatial relationships.  For example, if you were shown a set of complex abstract figures that you had never seen before and told that they are part of a pattern varying in shadings, geometric shapes, and size, like Figure 5, and you were asked to describe what the next abstract figure in the pattern would be, solving this problem would engage your fluid intelligence skills.  In fact, these kinds of pattern recognition problems are used to measure people’s performance on tests of fluid IQ, the most commonly used being the Ravens Progressive Matrices Test.  A real life application of fluid IQ would be the cognitive skills you would use if you planned an approach to solving a new and complex set of problems at the workplace.  Many of the skills of academic intelligence regularly use fluid IQ capabilities.

Figure 5. Problems illustrating the Raven’s Progressive Matrices Test

The other set of cognitive functions, known as crystallized IQ, is made up of our abilities to remember and understand facts and routine solutions to problems that we have accrued over our lives. If you were asked, for example, to name the first four Prime Ministers of the 20^th century, or how to calculate a sphere’s circumference, solving these problems would use your crystallized skills (including realizing that you once knew the answers to these but now can’t recall, although you do know where you can refresh your memory). While Flynn and others find some evidence of persistent, moderate rise in crystallized IQ across generations, it has been people’s fluid IQ skills that have climbed through the roof over the past 100 years.

But what should we make of this?  Is it really true that there are now many geniuses among us, or that in our grandparents’ day most people didn’t have the intelligence required to understand the rules of American baseball or British cricket?  Obviously not. And at the same time, 80 some years is a short time in the whole of human phylogenetic development (ie as a species) over roughly 200,000 years, much too short for any kind of massive genetic selection resulting in superior human intelligence throughout the population.  Instead all indications point to some impact of the immediate environment over the past century that has motivated and trained people’s capacity for fluid, and to a lesser extent, crystallized cognitive skills.

Results of a recent set of studies indicate that mass schooling is a major cause of this growing IQ among successive generations.  These studies were based on methods and ideas from an unusual combination of social and neuro-sciences that brought the neo-institutional analysis of schooling with exciting new findings and ideas about how the human brain develops and is transformed through everyday experiences in school (eg Eslinger et al, 2008).

The idea that formal education, spreading to ever wider proportions of the populations for increasingly longer times and with ever greater demands on people’s attention, is a likely cause of rising IQ is a dramatic demonstration of the constructivist nature of schooling.  Academic intelligence has become the central highly valued human skill of the schooled society, a skill that just century ago would have been considered overly narrow and of dubious benefit to the functioning person. Over time, formal education has made this type of cognitive performance a much valued and necessary skill that all students are expected to master. Not the learning of facts, nor the rote application of methods to problems, modern mass schooling from Kindergarten to increasingly at the highest reaches of college and university has promoted the cognitive skills of academic intelligence as the primary learning goal of an education.

C. Implications for the Future: BCH Questions

The assumption behind the thoughts on each of these issues is that the second scenario above, the continued intensification of the schooled society, is the one likely to happen, and so it is the only one considered here.

1. Educational goals: In these different scenarios how will the ‘goals’ of education change? What demands for qualification, socialisation and subjectification will there be as a result of these trends and in these different futures? What implications would there be for assessment practices?

The far more likely scenario of the continued intensification of the schooled society will not significantly shift educational goals from what they are now, but predicted here is an intensification and continued narrowing of goals.  The goals of academic education for all students, the rise of education as human capital through human development will continue to grow and replace older notions of vocationalism and classicism, as well as the imagery of man-power planning (Baker and Lenahrdt, 2008).  Because of the early development of British education over the 19^th century, ideas of elite and vocational education are embedded and could prove resistant to change.  So, too, academic intelligence will continue to shape both the curricular objective as well as institutions such as the workplace and the labor market.

Also it is unlikely that the model of knowledge production through the super RU will decline in the foreseeable future; Mode 1 continues to be quite healthy.  The super RU, and its components, appears not to be a fad.  The model of the super RU has spread across many nations as at least an aspiration, if not a full-blown plan.  If British educators and higher education officials incorporate this model in future plans for higher education, this will greatly enhance the nation’s educational and knowledge production competitiveness into the future.

2. Educational ‘personnel’: Who will be teaching/learning/mentoring/caring in the light of these trends and in these different futures?  How will risk to each of these different groups be exacerbated or reduced in different futures?

Teachers will be asked to be ever more academic in their approach, yet to a much wider variety of students from all kinds of backgrounds and with all kinds of strengths and weaknesses.  This paradox creates much of the stress in teaching.  If it is made explicit to all involved some of the stress can be overcome.  Obviously as the demands of academic intelligence and schooling in general rise and more of the populations of children and youth are asked to succeed at these for longer periods of their lives, more are at risk of needing more intensive remedial education.  The increase and penetration in to all facets of schooling of the American special education for academic at-risk students is a consequence of this.

The universities too will experience the same.  As described in section II A above, the support for the massive resources needed for state-of-the-art knowledge production will increasingly depend on wider societal support of higher education in general.  This means that teaching in the university will need to change in the direction of student-centered, with abundant remedial opportunities.

3. Educational institutions: Given these trends and potential scenarios, how might education be organised and governed? What accountability measures could be considered? What organisational and institutional structures become possible?

In many ways this is obvious from the description of the schooled society above.  One clear institutional implication of the knowledge production conglomerate and the super RU is that widespread Mode 2 knowledge production has not happened, or at least it has not reduced the role of the university as was originally predicted.  The need for wide societal support of knowledge production melds together more access to the university and science and scholarship.   The logic of the old organizational arrangement of breaking off research into non-university organizations that was so popular in Western Europe is not likely to be the best way to do this; in fact these arrangements as supported by elite scientists and scholars of these institutions, are likely to retard societal support in that they detract from the symbiotic process of mass education as the platform upon which a knowledge society is sustained.

So, too, accountability, at both the schooling level and in higher education (within the next few years there will be a PISA-type comparison of higher education students cross-nationally), will need to focus more on the ability of schools and universities to provide academic type training to all children and youth.  In other words, the standard of successful education narrow and intensify around academics too.  Different objectives for different people will continue to die out as a value, and will be replaced with the notion of the use of academically-based education as the only way to assist in the general human development of all the nation’s children and youth.

4. Educational methods: Given these trends, how might learning best be supported? How might teaching best be enabled? How might we best assess the outcomes of these methods?  What evidence do we have now that could be mobilised to respond to these trends?

Most germane here is the implication of rising and intensifying academic intelligence as the main object of schooling from the earliest years on. This trend will in the future put even greater pressure on educators to devise methods to assist all learners to master these cognitive skills.  The intensive narrowing focus on these skills will make a major social problem out of those who cannot master these skills.  This will be a formable challenge for formal education into the future.

5. Educational tools: In these different scenarios, what artefacts (material, conceptual, knowledge-based, technical) will we be able to employ in support of education and assessment? What interventions and practices that we see in education now could give us insight into how we might use these artefacts in future?

It is a reasonable prediction to make that the continued cognitive-ization of educational materials will occur well into the future.  The same is true of new knowledge in general.  Educators, teachers and professors alike, will need to be trained in these ideas.  Right now in the US, for example, most teachers and professor (other than psychology professors) have a rather crude introduction to the ideas and findings of the cognitive revolution in the study of the human brain and mind and its capabilities.  This is a limitation that needs to be addressed.

6. Educational outcomes: In these different scenarios who will benefit? Who will be at risk? What interventions could be designed to enable equity of outcome?

Thoughts on this are covered in sections 2 and 4 above.

7. Beliefs about education: In these different scenarios, what views might the wider public have about the goals and aspirations of education? What different approaches to education might they more readily accept or reject? This area has been added after discussion with the EAG, and will be considered not only through the Challenges but also through the Public and Stakeholder engagement programme.

Thoughts on this have been covered in I and II A above.

References

Baker, D. (forthcoming a) The Schooled Society: How The Quiet Educational Revolution Transforms Society.

Baker, D. (forthcoming b) Privatization, Mass Higher Education, and the Super Research University: Symbiotic or Zero-sum Trends? Die Hochschule (German Journal on Higher Education).

Baker, D., Knipe, H., Cummings, E., Collins, J., Gamson, D., Blair, C., and Leon, J. (forthcoming c) One Hundred Years of American Primary School Mathematics: A Content Analysis and Cognitive Assessment of Textbooks from 1900 to 2000.

Baker, D. (1999) Schooling All the Masses: Reconsidering the Origins of American Schooling in the Postbellum Era. Sociology of Education, 72 (4), pp.197-215.

Baker, D. and LeTendre, G., (2005) National Differences, Global Similarities: World Culture and the Future of Schooling. Stanford, CA., Stanford University Press.

Baker, D., Stock, M. and Koehler, H. (2007) Socialist ideology and the contraction of higher education: Institutional consequences of state manpower and education planning in the former East Germany, 1949 to 1989. Comparative Education Review, 51 (3), pp.353-377.

Bowles, S. and Gintis, H. (1976) Schooling in Capitalist America. New York, Basic Books.

Berg, I. (1971, 2003) Education and Jobs: The Great Training Robbery. New York, Praeger Press.

Burris, V. (1983) The Social and Political Consequences of Overeducation. American Sociological Review, 48 (4), pp.454-467.

Collins, R. (1979) The Credential Society. New York, Academic Press.

Dore, R. (1976) The Diploma Disease: Education, Qualification, and Development. London, Institute of Education.

Eslinger, P., Blair, C., Wang, J., Lipovsky, B., Realmuto, J., Baker, D., Thorne, S., Gamson, D., Zimmerman, E., Rohrer, L. and Yang, Q. (2008) Developmental Shifts in fMRI Activations During Visuospatial Relational Reasoning. Brain and Cognition.

Fiala, R. (2006) Educational Ideology and the School Curriculum. In: Benavot, A. and Braslavsky, C. (eds). School Knowledge in Comparative and Historical Perspective, pp.15-35. Comparative Education Research Center, University of Hong Kong. Hong Kong, Springer Books.

Flynn, J.R. (1987) Massive IQ gains in 14 nations: What IQ tests really measure. Psychological Bulletin, 101, pp.171-191.

Frank, D. and Gabler, J. (2006) Reconstructing the University: Worldwide Shifts in Academia in the 20th Century. Stanford CA., Stanford University Press.

Geiger, R. (1993) Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research University since World War II. New York, Oxford University Press.

Geiger, R. (2004a) Knowledge and money: Research universities and the paradox of the marketplace. Stanford, Stanford University Press.

Geiger, R. and Sa, C. (2008) Tapping the Riches of Science: Universities and the Promise of Economic Growth. Cambridge, Harvard University Press

Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P. and Trow, M. (1994) The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. London, Sage Publication.

Meyer, J. (1977) The effects of education as an institution. American Journal of Sociology, 83 (1), pp.55-77.

Meyer, J., Ramirez, F., Frank, D. and Schofer, E. (2007) Higher Education as an Institution. In: Gumport, P. (ed) Sociology of Higher Education: Contributions and their Contexts. Baltimore, MD., Johns Hopkins University Press.

Mohrman, K., Ma, W. and Baker, D. (2007) The Emerging Global Model of the Research University. In: Altbach, P. and Peterson, P. (eds.) Higher Education in the New Century: Global Challenges and Innovative Ideas. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense Publishers, and co-published by UNESCO Paris France.

Schofer, E. and Meyer, J. (2006) The World-Wide Expansion of Higher Education in the Twentieth Century. American Sociological Review, 70 (6), pp.898-920.

Trow, M. (2005) Reflections on the Transition from Elite to Mass to Universal Access: Forms and Phases of Higher Education in Modern Societies since WWII. International Handbook of Higher Education. Edited by Philip Altbach, Kluwer, 2005

UNESCO (2003-2004) UNESCO – EFA Global Monitoring Report. Available from http://portal.unesco.org/education/en/ev.php-URL_ID=23023&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics (2005) Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study 1993/2003. Washington DC, U.S. Government Printing Office.

Young, M. (2008) Bringing Knowledge Back in: From Social Constructivism to social realism in the Sociology of Education. London, Routledge.

Willis, P. (1981) Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Contributors, New York, Columbia University Press.

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.

Most people who are still illiterate are living in very poor nations and seven out of ten are women (UNESCO, 2003).

In many parts of the Humanities and the Social Sciences the term ‘design’ has, quite recently, come into widespread use. Certainly that is the case, among others, in communication and in education. As with any term that suddenly acquires fashionability, one needs to ask: ‘what are the reasons?’ and ‘is this more than mere fashion?’ Might the use of the term be an indicator of corresponding changes in the larger social environment? From a historical perspective of these areas, say over the last 70 to 80 years, it is possible to trace a path which starts with convention and adherence to convention – a period from the 1930sinto the late 1950s, solidly founded on power and the working of power in communities. From the 1960s on and into the mid 1980s we saw a move to critique. In education, critique – as in ‘being a critical reader’- has settled into a near commonsense mainstream position. Now, at the beginning of the 21^st century, design is seemingly challenging to become a prominent, maybe the central, term in this respect.

To take two key concepts – text and knowledge - as examples. Texts, whether as essay, report, or ’story’, used to be composed, in line with relatively well understood and settled generic conventions as a guide. Then it seemed to become essential to begin questioning the processes of composition, to subject the status of the generic conventions to critique, to challenge the power that seemed manifested in the processes and conventions, as they seemed to work to the benefit of some and to the detriment of others. Critique works in relation to stable environments, and its task is to bring these into crisis. Environments marked by instability, provisionality, and fluidity do not lend themselves to critique; such environments demand the shaping force of design.

In contemporary conditions knowledge is made: in wikis, in blogs, but also – without fuss or notice – in everyday conversation, in instances of entirely commonplace, unremarkable, banal interaction. Canonical knowledge is challenged everywhere and under attack: whether in the natural sciences – witness the rows around theories of evolution vs ‘intelligent design’ or in any domain of social life. Canonical representations of knowledge have become unstable, whether as mode (writing vs image) or as genre (the essay vs the narrative or the cartoon, etc): writing as the canonical mode par excellence previously is giving way to representation as image. The school is given the task of upholding canonical forms of knowledge (and canonical forms of representation, eg through the National Literacy Strategy); though without the support of a clear direction from society, never mind that of a state which faces the plurality of voices of a profoundly diverse society. Universities are not immune to these conditions: Wikipedia appears as source of reference in student work – even at PhD level – with other internet sites and alongside the canonical media of the book and the journal.

Knowledge and meaning, as much as the texts and objects which are their material realizations, are beginning to be seen as the outcomes of processes of design. Education, founded on knowledge, rests on design, its requirements and principles, whether overtly acknowledged or implicitly practiced. That is the case in relation to the design of environments of education, environments of learning and teaching, of materials and of the media involved. Design is at issue in the shaping of the social relations of pedagogy as in the social relations embedded in curricula. Design is the arrangement of an ensemble: of an object to be worked on or with, of a tool for an action with or on the object, integrated in specific ways into the capacities and affordances of the human body, a body with a history of experience of other, prior social processes, and subject more or less, and in different ways, to social regulation of the process. The design of a learning environment configures relations of body and tool, of tool and object; it also configures relations of affect. The design of, say, a textbook, is more than graphic design: it is the design of a complex ensemble, of an environment of social processes and configurations of social relations, of social purposes, goals, aims, tasks; and of affect.

There is a multiplicity of social reasons for the emergence of design as a metaphor for contemporary knowledge production, creativity and communication: instability of social environments (ie the fragmentation, disappearance of stable, reliable, ‘accepted’ conventions), the strong insistence and ‘assumption’ of agency by individuals – including children at ever younger ages (a result of the dominance of the market rather than the state as the major social/political force, with a change from notions of social responsibility to individual choice), the multiplicity of resources available in shaping realizations of meaning, including the meanings of identity. The instability of social environments has removed clear models for action, behaviour, etc and requires that individuals take responsibility for their actions. The assumption of individual agency - fostered and even forced by the state and fostered and urged by the market – means that the shaping of individual identity becomes a matter of individual design. The multiplicity of resources offered by the market provides the means for the individual’s shaping of identity – though with means provided by the market – and makes it a requirement that individuals assume responsibility for their shaping of meaning in their social environments.

Looking back

Educational media, such as textbooks, have undergone major changes over the last century (Bezemer and Kress, 2008; Bezemer and Kress, in press). Society has changed, curriculum and pedagogy have changed in line with social changes, consequently textbooks have changed, both in ‘look’ and in ‘content’. If we compare a textbook published in 1930 with one published more recently, we can see – from the point of view of content – that the subject now includes material on ‘popular’ culture and media; pedagogically, there are now requirements to engage with these materials in groups, much more than before. But we can also see the semiotic work of design that has been done. There are full colour images on almost every page, both photographs and drawings, the layout of a text consisting of writing and image on the page now configured as a site of display, a site of appearance, could not have been imagined in 1930.

What has changed, in other words, is not just subject-content, not just the tasks which are set up for learners so as to engage with subject knowledge; what has changed is how these pedagogic interests are graphically realized on paper. Or rather, the ‘look’, the layout, the arrangement of the site of appearance is a graphic/visual realization of new social relations between the social participants in educational environments. The ordering, the arrangement of materials using the space of a page or screen is done from the perspective of an educator/rhetor, who has an eye equally on ‘own interest’, on ‘audience’, ‘phenomenon to be communicated’, ‘broader social environment’, ‘effect of the arrangement’; in other words it instantiates the educational purposes in the design of the materials.

Designers use the resources for making meaning which are available and apt to serve their educational interests. The category of textbook designer includes authors as well as illustrators, editors, typesetters, and other professionals. Each of these professionals has available and uses specific resources with different potentials and constraints. Different resources – modes, genres, discourses – are apt for doing specific kinds of ontological, epistemological or pedagogic work. Professionals in this field potentially operate as teams, as an ‘ensemble’ and so bring their contribution to the overall design. Increasingly now teachers themselves act as rhetors/designers of digitally mediated materials, thus bringing their interests and agency into this semiotic work (Jewitt, 2008).

Figures 1 and 2 show two examples from Science textbooks which illustrate the range of changes in design that have taken place over the last 70 years or so. One example is from a Science textbook from 1935, the other one is from 2002. In both textbooks images are used to depict parts of the human body with writing directly attached to ‘anchor’ the images. But the placement of these ‘chunks’ on the page is different. In the 1935 textbook, placement seems to have followed the ‘traditional’ principle of ‘insert-Figure X-about-here’. This principle suggests that writing is the central means of conveying meaning and is the major component of the text; image is subordinate to that. In the contemporary textbook, writing and image are placed in parallel columns. This principle suggests that writing and image are on an equal footing. In other words, the status relation between image and writing has shifted from an unequal to an equal position. Ontologically, this implies a shift in the valuation of modes and knowledge: from an ontology in which knowledge constructed in writing dominates over knowledge constructed in image, to an ontology in which these bases for knowledge have equal standing.

Figure 1: Excerpt from Fairbrother, Nightingale and Wyeth, 1935, pp161-162.

Figure 2: Drawing after Science Education Group, 2002, pp90-91.

These different layouts have different effects. Most immediately, this has directional implications: in the 1935 example, the writing makes reference to the image at the beginning and at the end of the opening paragraph of a section on ‘the alimentary canal’. In between, the reader will have had to turn the page. Less immediately it has effects on engagement for learning, encouraging different modes of reading, different modes of engagement. It says ‘attend to this first and that after’. In other words, this layout does not facilitate a ‘parallel reading’ in the way layout does in the 2002 example. In the 2002 example, the layout steers the reader into a mode of a ‘back-and-forth’ movement. It is a mode of engagement of ‘attend to these as equally significant; read them in mutual interaction’. In the example from the 1935, the layout steers the reader into a ‘first-then’ mode of reading. In the 2002 example, the page on which chunks are laid out is itself part of a larger structure, that of the two-page-spread. Again, this stands in contrast to the 1935 textbooks, where text-as-writing was ‘pushed’ onto pages without much attention to how this played out spatially. What mattered was not where on the page a sign appeared, but where it was positioned in a sequence. The two-page spread is organized as a spatial unit, which is linked to a unit of time not present on the page, a ‘lesson’; the chapter in the old textbook is organized as a unit of ‘content’.

Looking sideways: a Japanese design

Figure 3 shows an example taken from a Japanese Science textbook published in 2006. The excerpt also deals with human digestion. It uses a range of modal resources to represent the absorption of food, involving the breaking down of food molecules as a result of the action of enzymes coming from organs located somewhere in the body. In the English textbook shown in Figure 2, the curricular material dealt with had led to two different accounts: image focused on spatial arrangement and an ordering of entities such as ‘organs’. It was a ‘physical’ account, the physiology of digestion, showing material features such as ’size’, ’shape’, and ‘links’ between organs. The writing focused on processes, ‘flowing’ ‘chewing’, ‘breaking down’, ‘absorbing’; and entities such as ‘food chains’, ‘food webs’. It was a ‘bio-chemical’ account, detailing entities such as ‘energy’, ‘complex organic chemicals’ , ‘large complex molecules’, fats’, ‘proteins’, ‘carbohydrates’.

Figure 3: Drawing after Miura et al, 2006, pp106-107.

In the Japanese excerpt by contrast, image and writing are not separated out in that way. Image is literally ‘all over’ the page, visually dominating it. Image is used to convey both the physiological account and the bio-chemical one. Writing offers one route, a key to reading the visual parts of the text, but the visual text may also offer a key to reading the written part of the overall text. These texts may lead learners to attend and to engage differently and in this play a different role for different readers at different stages of the learning process. The overall text, in other words, offers inroads into an understanding of human digestion both via writing and via images. Students can choose for themselves which path to follow at which point in their encounter with this text and at different stages in the process of learning. When they first encounter the topic they might rely more heavily on the visual text; when they revise the topic for their exam they might then rely more heavily on the written account.

Two points need to be noted which do not appear readily by looking at the design of the contemporary English material alone. The first point is that it seemed that in designing the English textbook, writing was chosen for process-oriented content and that image was chosen for static, nominal entities and spatial relations or connections. It might seem that this follows an inherent potential, an affordance, in the two modes. The Japanese example clearly demonstrates that that is not the case. The second point is that these materials were designed in an entirely different society to that of the English book. We need to take our own principle seriously that design is the materialization of social givens. One thing we do know is that the semiotic and cultural resources, the semiotic histories, of Japanese society are different to those of English. For one thing – and this is a major factor – the script system(s) of Japanese are entirely different to the English, and much more visually oriented. This is bound to lead to a profoundly different attitude to the potentials of visual modes in Japanese design than in English.

While we have not encountered such a functional distribution of modes in English textbooks as in the Japanese example, we have seen distinctively different uses of image and writing in English information books. Here we have in mind, for instance, the books produced by Dorling & Kindersley. Unlike textbooks, information books do not construct a formal curriculum. Usually they are bought by parents, not teachers, though they are found in school libraries. Very similar multimodal designs are common in magazines for teenagers. Indeed the distinction of ‘types of design’ is becoming very blurry as we mentioned earlier: the boundaries between ‘informal’ and ‘formal’ social spaces are increasingly becoming blurred. The boundaries between the design of the English Science textbook and that of the English information book are a good case in point: the increasing approximation of design marks a rapidly increasing disintegration of the social domains of work and entertainment. It is interesting to speculate where the end point of this process will be.

Looking forward: a multimedia design

Design in education increasingly relies on the facilities of digital media. On the screen, moving image and speech can be used alongside or instead of writing. These modes afford a whole set of varied resources for the representation of school subjects. In other words, ‘translations’ and ‘transductions’ from one mode to another can now be made with relative ease; at relatively low ‘cost’ (Kress, 2003). The textbook may ‘transduct’ artefacts and actions into writing and image; on the web, artefacts and actions may be transducted into moving image and speech, as the screenshot below, Figure 4, shows. It is a still from an animation on rotational transformations. The ’scene’ uses several modes – it shows through the use of image; it tells through speech; and it describes through writing – how to rotate an angle. Below the image of the protractor there is a written textual element; it is read out aloud – performed – so it is also present in the mode of speech. The text reads as follows.

Figure 4: Screenshot from lgfl.skoool.co.uk, retrieved 1 August 2007.

“Put pointer of compass on point ‘a’. Open out compass to length of ‘ac’. Draw a curve which passes through ‘c’. This ensures that the length of the lines in the image will be the same as in the original triangle. This makes sure that the length of ‘ac’ (the image) is the same as ‘ac’ (the original) because the size of an object doesn’t change during rotation”.

Here there is transduction from artefact (the compass, the mode of 3D material entities) to writing, with effects similar to those discussed before. These affect the specificity and generality of the content, as well as having effects on ordering. The voice-over reading of the written ’script’ uses speech for the transduction of the modes of artefact and action. The mode of moving image is used for the transduction of action. In this example, ‘pitch as tone’ is used to foreground particular lexical items; in the written text-element foregrounding is done by syntax.

Below is our transcript of the voice-over version; we have marked the boundaries between intonation units using a double slash, and we have underlined the items where the major pitch movement occurs (a ‘fall’ in each case). The element with the major pitch movement marks it as providing ‘new information’. This creates a contrast of ‘given’ and ‘new’ information within each ‘information unit’ (cf. Halliday, 1967).

Put pointer of compass // on point a //. Open out // compass to length of a c //.

Draw a curve // which passes through c //. This ensures // that the length of the lines in the image // will be the same as in the original triangle //. This makes sure // that the length of a c // the image // is the same as a c // the original //. Because the size // of an object // doesn’t change during rotation //.

If we compare the written and the spoken text-elements, we see that the two modes provide distinctive readings and, with that, different potentials for learning, in each case. In the written segment, the first three sentences draw the reader’s attention to the first-mentioned element – the action to be performed: put, open out, draw – and to the (imperative) mood, foregrounding action as command. In the spoken version, the listener’s attention is drawn to the object involved – ‘compass’; location – ‘point a’; extent of action – ‘out’; etc. What ensues is a contrapuntal organization, with the mode of writing highlighting action-as-commands – put, open out, draw - and the mode of speech highlighting objects and attendant circumstances – location, shape.

In this example there is also use of the mode of moving image, which combines the affordances of still image and its spatial organization with temporal organization: it unfolds in time. That brings distinct increases in semiotic resources and therefore in potentials for design. Elements can now appear and disappear, and through that, movement can be suggested. Above all, the viewer or reader’s attention can be shaped. In the scene that we are looking at here, the first element to appear is the triangle. Then the compass appears, placed with its pointer at ‘A’. Then two movements take place: the ‘opening out’ of the compass and the inscription of a curve. Then the compass disappears again. In this, the moving image represents the demonstration of how to use a compass rather differently from the written and spoken text-elements. For instance, it is specific about what ‘opening out’ and ‘drawing a curve’ entails. ‘Drawing a curve’ is displayed as a movement of the compass whereby one of its legs retains its position and the other leg, which leaves a trace, makes a gentle, clockwise turn.

The example shows that as a multiplicity of modes – image, writing, speech and moving image – become available, the potential for design alters radically. Resources with particular affordances become available for specific use; here, for instance, lexis or depiction bring implications for generality or specificity; syntactic resources have implications for variable arrangements of entities, as well as means for the expression of the social relations of the maker of a message and its ‘reader’ – the relation of ‘command’ for instance. For the designer of the learning materials the question becomes one of ‘aptness‘ of the resources for the specific occasion. There are implications for pedagogy: commands are given in the modes of writing and speech; in the mode of (moving) image, actors can be backgrounded; in the mode of (still) image, reading paths are established by the viewer or learner, while in moving image, reading paths are established by the designer. These design decisions concerning the use of modes are in effect materializations and ‘ratifications’ of pedagogic designs and they in turn are realizations of social organizations and arrangements. The design strongly sets the ‘ground’ for engagement and learning.

Young people’s participation in design

Design is no longer exclusively the realm of professional textbook makers, as in the examples discussed so far, or of teachers alone. Participation in design now best describes the characteristics of communication, and not only in schools. That has profound effects on knowledge production. Social change has led to an emphasis on the agentive action of all participants in communication, even if differentially. Communication needs to be seen as a two stage process, with an initiator/rhetor producing a message as the ‘ground’ and an interpreter, on the basis of the ‘ground’, constructing a ‘prompt’ for interpretation, leading to the meaning which the interpreter takes from that message. It means that design takes place twice: at the point of the making of the message as the ‘ground’ and at the point of interpreting the ‘prompt’. Young people act out of such understandings of their power in communication in design and knowledge production (Pahl, 1999; Stein, 2003). In other words, the social changes mentioned, have begun to manifest themselves in an assumption on the part of the young of their significant agency in the domain of their own cultural production. The production of knowledge is inseparable from the production of signs-as-text. Semiotic production is, at one and the same time, epistemological and ontological production. The question in each case is: whose agency is at work?

These social and representational changes are evident in contemporary media as well: the participatory affordances of current media technologies act to blur former distinctions of production and consumption, of writing and reading. The simultaneously global and local ‘reach’ of media challenges the boundaries of communities global and local, with severe effects on genres; it mixes contents both global and local; ubiquity of access to information, convergence of media and connectivity in the sphere of individual lives entails that occasions of and resources for knowledge production and creativity are not tied to particular sites and times. Multimodality, representations in many modes, allows and demands the choice of apt communicational resources in all situations.

The newer individual dispositions toward agency have deep effects on design processes. All aspects of the domain of meaning are drawn into the new social givens, with far-reaching effects. In relation to the making of texts, for instance, questions of ‘authenticity’ and authorship have changed profoundly. In downloading, ‘mixing’, cutting and pasting, ’sampling’, re-contextualization, questions such as “where did this come from?” “Who is the original/originating author” seem not the issue. Much like the use, in former times, of a ruined church or monastic building as a quarry, as a source of building materials – a large stone here as a lintel, another there as part of a wall – texts are taken as ‘resources’ to be ‘mined’ for the making of new texts. There is an absolute need to understand the practices, epistemologies, aesthetics and ethics of contemporary forms of text design. At the moment these are discussed in terms of 19^th century models, with terms such as ‘plagiarism’ or ‘mere copying’ often too readily to hand: that is, the invocation of models from an era where conceptions of authorship were clear and legally buttressed. The notion of design and an elaboration of principles of design can give, instead, a relevant means of describing and analysing current principles of text-making underlying these practices by certain, generationally defined, groups.

At the moment the school is caught between traditional and contemporary conceptions of authority and agency in relation to production of knowledge, to the authoring of texts, the authority/canonicity of knowledge, and of semiotic forms much more generally. Political authority is contradictory: a demand for the new, for innovation and creativity, countered by anxieties around loss of control. But learning has long since left the confines of institutions such as school, university, and college, and forms of pedagogy have to accommodate to ‘life-long’, life-wide’ learning, that is, learning at all times, by those who demand that their interests be taken with utmost seriousness, in all sites, in all phases of professional and personal life. In school, many young people see themselves as authors of the knowledge they want and need, authors of the kinds of texts that meet their social, personal and affective needs – even though authored by processes which bring them into conflict with authority which is focused traditionally. In that they come into conflict with the sharply differing and contradictory conceptions and practices of the school. Conceptions of pedagogy held by ‘the school’ as institution are at loggerheads with those held – however implicitly – by those in school. In that stand-off, conceptions of pedagogy will need to be developed which accommodate the conflicting interests of generation, of power, of politics, and of a market-dominated economy. Clearly, the agency of learners has to be taken seriously and placed at the centre of pedagogic attention. Equally clearly, the insights, understandings, values, knowledges which are the results of centuries, even millennia, of social and cultural work cannot and should not suddenly be ditched.

Shaping the future of education

Three factors need to be held in mind in speculating about trends in design: agency and distributions of and claims to agency, the multiplicity of resources for making meaning available as resources for design, and the deep social and cultural diversity of contemporary societies. All three have social and semiotic aspects, that is, they bring social political and semiotic consequences.

Pedagogically, the agency and the centrality of learners as designers of texts and as designers and makers of their meanings, has to be the starting point of all considerations in education. It is unlikely that the claim by learners to agency in the processes of learning will abate over the next decade or so. This has consequences for institutional responses to such claims, and to a new conceptualization of the role of institutions in that process. We have made one suggestion, namely that an institution’s task can be the design of environments for learning and the shaping of the curricular ‘ground’ for the learners’ engagement.

Semiotically, text making will increasingly be, at all times, multimodally designed, arising from the specific interests of rhetor and interpreter. In such designs the affordances of all modes are judged and used in relation to that interest. The multiplicity of modal resources for imagining and implementing design link both with the agency of designers, both in the role of initiators and designers of messages and in the role of designers as interpreters of these messages. In political agendas focused on innovation and creativity, design as a prospective and therefore always necessarily innovative and transformative process will need to come more and more into the foreground of pedagogic attention.

The tasks of understanding the new givens of representation, communication, innovation and creativity lie with researchers and policy makers and the designers of pedagogies and curricula. That is, several institutions will need to be involved and aware of their respective competences and responsibilities. The claim and assumption of agency in design by learners of all kinds poses a profound challenge in terms of developing theories and practical means for understanding multimodal design. This is both in terms of means for valuing learners’ interests and meanings and in terms of criteria for evaluating meanings realized as multimodal ’semiotic objects’. In other words, theories of learning will need to refocus their metrics of value, evaluation, and assessment from criteria derived from authority and power to criteria oriented to understanding the principles applied in the learners’ design.

Captions

Figure 1: Excerpt from Fairbrother, Nightingale and Wyeth, 1935, pp161-162.

Figure 2: Drawing after Science Education Group, 2002, pp90-91.

Figure 3: Drawing after Miura et al, 2006, pp106-107.

Figure 4: Screenshot from lgfl.skoool.co.uk, retrieved 1 August 2007.

Bibliography

Bezemer, J. and Kress, G. (2008) Writing in multimodal texts: a social semiotic account of designs for learning. Written Communication, 25 (2), pp166-195 (Special Issue on Writing and New Media).

Bezemer, J. and Kress, G. (in press) Visualizing English: A Social Semiotic History of a School Subject. Visual Communication. Special Issue on Information Environments.

Brindle, K., Machin, R. and Thomas, P. (2002) Folens GCSE English for AQA/A. Dunstable, Folens.

Fairbrother, F., Nightingale, E. and Wyeth, F.J. (1935) General Science. Part III. London, G. Bell and Sons.

Jewitt, C. (2008) Technology, Literacy, Learning: A Multimodal Approach. London, Routlege.

Kress, G. (2003) Literacy in the new media age. London, Routlege.

Miura, N. et al (2006) New Science: Field 2, Volume 1 [Atarashii Kagaku 2 Bunya Jou]. Tokyo, Shoseki.

Pahl, K. (1999) Transformations: Children’s Meaning Making in Nursery Education. Stoke on Trent, Trentham Books.

Science Education Group (2002) Salters GCSE Science Y11. Oxford, Heinemann.

Stein, P. (2003) The Olifantsvlei fresh stories project. In: Jewitt, C. and Kress, G. (eds.) Multimodal Literacy. New York, Peter Lang, pp123-138.

Acknowledgements

This article draws on an ongoing research project, ‘Gains and Losses:

Changes in Representation, Knowledge and Pedagogy in Learning Resources’ (2007-2009), funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (RES-062-23-0224).

About the authors

Professor Gunther Kress

Institute of Education

Centre for Multimodal Research

20 Bedford Way

London WC1H 0AL

United Kingdom

phone:+44 20 7612 6502

fax     +44 20 7612 6177

email   g.kress@ioe.ac.uk

Dr Jeff Bezemer

Institute of Education

Centre for Multimodal Research

20 Bedford Way

London WC1H 0AL

United Kingdom

phone:+44 20 7612 6705

fax     +44 20 7612 6177

email   j.bezemer@ioe.ac.uk

Gunther Kress is Professor of Semiotics and Education at the Institute of Education, University of London. He is interested in questions of meaning and its semiotic realizations in interrelation with social and cultural organization. In his professional location, his focus is on learning and on the material shape of curricula and forms of pedagogy in a globalizing world. Among his recent books are Multimodal Discourse, Before Writing: Rethinking Paths to Literacy, Literacy in the New Media Age, and Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design.

Jeff Bezemer received his Master’s degree in Studies in Language and Culture and his PhD in Education from Tilburg University, Netherlands. He is Research Officer at the Institute of Education, Centre for Multimodal Research. His research is focused on representation and communication in educational settings. Recent publications, including articles in Written Communication and Linguistics and Education, also deal with multilingualism in immigrant settings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2.3.2   Potential challenges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2.4.1   The demands of a changing landscape

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

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

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

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

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

2.4.2   The goals of education

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

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

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

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

2.4.3   Teachers and learners

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

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

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

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

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

2.4.4   Organization and governance

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

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

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

2.4.5   Supporting learning: artefacts, interventions and practices

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

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

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

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

2.4.6   Learning cycles in a lifetime of change

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

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

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

Professor David Baker

Pennsylvania State University, U.SA.

The modernizing role of schools as institutions

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

Professor Steven Brown

School of Management, University of Leicester

Learning, Remembering and Meta-cognitive/communication skills

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

Professor Anna Craft

Education Department, University of Exeter and the Open University

Creativity in the school

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

Dr John Cromby

Psychology Department, Loughborough University

The move from social explanations toward neuroscience

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

Lewis Goodings

Psychology Department,Loughborough University

Changes in knowledge construction, participation and networks

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

Dr David Guile

Faculty of Policy and Society, Institute of Education

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

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

Professor Denis Hayes, and Dr Kathryn Ecclestone

Education Department, Oxford Brookes University

Affect: Knowledge, communication, creativity and emotion

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

Professor Steve Higgins

Durham University

Learning to learn

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

Dr Helen Horst

Education Department, University of California, Irvine

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

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

Dr Gabrielle Ivinson

Education Department, Cardiff University

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

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

Professor Ken Jones

Education Department, Keele University

The dynamic relationship between knowledge, identities, community and culture

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

Professor Gunther Kress, and Dr Jeff Bezemer

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

Multimodal Design: knowledge, communication and creativity

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

Professor Hugh Lauder, Department of Education, University of Bath

Professor Phillip Brown, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University

Dr Ceri Brown, University of Bath

The consequences of global expansion for knowledge, creativity and communication

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

Professor Victoria Carrington, Education Department, University of South Australia

Professor Jackie Marsh, Education Department University of Sheffield

Forms of literacy

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

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

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

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

Embodiment/the body, knowledge, creativity and communication

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

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

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

Lincs, University of Gothenburg

Technology, representation and knowing

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

Professor Keith Sawyer

Education Department, Washington University, St. Louis

The future of learning in the age of innovation

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

Dr Michael Schillmeier,

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany

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

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

Julian Sefton-Green

Director, West-Hampstead Arts Centre

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

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

Dr Slyvia Wolf and Professor Robin Alexander

Education Department Cambridge University

Pedagogy: Argumentation and dialogic teaching

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

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

Professor Johann Muller Cape Town University

Thinking about the future: Lessons from the sociology of knowledge

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

Additional reference

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

The scope of the challenge

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

Professor Michael Young, Institute of Education, University of London

Professor Karen Littleton, Open University

Professor Steven Brown, Leicester University

Professor Jackie Marsh, Sheffield University

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

Review topic areas

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

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

Challenge activities

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

Knowledge, creativity and communication: Event 1

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

Knowledge, creativity and communication: Event 2

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

Event participants

Name, institutional affiliation

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

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

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

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

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

From Gutenberg to Google: plus ça change?

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

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

Benjamin, 1939

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

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

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

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

So what is learning to learn?

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

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

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

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

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

(Higgins et al, 2007 p8)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Hoskins and Fredriksson, 2008, p11)

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

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

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

(Dewey, 1910, p106)

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

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

The physical architecture and learning to learn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pedagogical architecture for learning to learn

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

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

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

Challenges for the future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

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

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

The profile of the creative and cultural (C&C) sector has for a combination of economic, social and educational reasons, risen dramatically since New Labour came to power in 1997 (Bilton, 2007; Garnham, 2005; Hesmonhalgh, 2005). Economically, the sector has presented itself, and been perceived by ministers, as a paradigmatic example of the ‘information/knowledge-based’ industries which economic gurus assume will be the basis of nation states’ prosperity in the 21^st Century (Porter and Ketas, 2003). Socially, the sector symbolizes the type of cultural diversity that New Labour’s quasi-social democratic project aspired to foster because it generates new cultural products and services and new culturally diverse audiences for those products and services (Guile, 2006). Educationally, an increasing number of young people aspire to enter the sector (DCMS, 2001). Taken in combination, these developments have led the government to accept that all young people should be offered an opportunity to ‘express and channel their creativity through a wide range of activities’ in primary, secondary and tertiary education to both support their creative aspirations (DCMS, 2001, foreword), and to maintain that higher-level qualifications are the vehicle to assist them to gain access to the C&C sector.

This paper questions the link that policymakers assume exists between qualifications and access to employment in the C&C sector. It first identifies how labour market conditions in the C&C sector do not reflect the prevailing conventional wisdom that qualifications are the ‘magic bullet’ (Keep, 1999) for securing employment. Secondly, it demonstrates how the dynamics of policy formation in the UK impose a straitjacket on the education and training (E&T) system thereby denying E&T agencies the autonomy to intervene to assist people post-qualification to gain access to the sector. Thirdly, it identifies the way that non-government agencies -’intermediary organisations’ – address this problem by providing new spaces and pedagogies to assist aspiring entrants to develop the requisite form of ‘vocational practice’ and ’social capital’ to enter the sector (Guile and Okumoto, 2008). The paper concludes that, if the government wants the C&C sector to realize the aforementioned economic and social goals, it will have to foster more ‘heterarchical’ (Jessop, 1998) governance cultures to support demand-and-supply side E&T partners to work together to develop innovative strategies to enhance entry routes into the C&C sector.

The creative and cultural industrial sector

The distinctive features of the sector

It is widely accepted that although some industries in the C&C sector, for example, art and design, broadcasting, film, music, etc, have been a longstanding feature of the UK and for that matter the American, European, and Pacific Rim economies, the process of industrial convergence, centred around the use of digital technology, which began in the late 1980s has gradually established the conditions for these sectors to be to be intertwined economically and technologically in radically new ways (Coffee, 1996; Tapscot, 1995). The C&C sector is a paradigmatic example of this type of convergence. Sometimes the sector is defined in terms of the outputs achieved by the following fifteen industries: Crafts, Design, Fashion, Film, Music, Performing Arts, Publishing, Research and Development, Software, Toys, TV and Radio and Video Games (Howkins, 2002). On other occasions it is defined in terms of the occupations that generate the new ideas that enable those industrial segments to flourish (Florida, 2002). Irrespective of which view of the C&C sector is adopted, it is generally agreed that it is now worth worldwide about $2.2 trillion and, according to the World Bank’s estimation, is growing at 5% per year (Florida, 2002). The largest market is America which is now worth in excess of $1 trillion while Britain is ranked third in the creative economy behind Japan. The UK’s creative and cultural sector generates revenues of around £115 billion and employs 1.3 million people. They contribute over £10 billion in exports and account for over 5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and, moreover, output from these sectors grew by more than twice that of the economy as a whole in the late 1990s (DCMS, 2001).

Trans-nationally, the profile of the clusters and sectors that comprise the C&C sector are rather different from the historical profile of conventional economic sectors such as the automobile and pharmaceutical industries (Florida, 2002). The latter industries are characterised by strong national identities and vibrant corporate sectors, with strong ’strategies’, ’structures’ and ’systems’ which facilitated the manufacture of standardized products and services (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1997). Whilst globalization has transformed competitive strategies and work organization in those industries significantly, they still tend to be involved with large-scale production. In contrast, the profile and structure of the C&C is characterised by a mix of a small number of global corporations and national organizations and a very large number of SMEs and freelance work, which is concentrated in specific regions, and who continually form value chains and networks, often for a short duration, to develop a continual flow of new products or services (Florida, 2002).

Furthermore, unlike industrial sectors such as the automobile, engineering and medical sectors which have historically been characterized by very strong ‘occupational labour markets’ (OLMs) and firm-specific ‘internal labour markets’ (FILMs) (Ashton, 1995), the creative and cultural sector is characterised predominantly by ‘external labour markets’ (ELMs). These labour markets function in rather different ways from one another. OLMs enable new entrants to be trained in a range of skills which provide competence in specific occupations. This process of occupational socialization results in the development of an identification with an occupation, for example, engineer, nurse, mechanic, as well as a ’skill base’ that can be enhanced through further training within firms. FILMs provide a series of job or career ladders which, following further training, enable young employees to be promoted and to progress within an organization.

These labour market conditions are only really found in those segments of the C&C sector which have developed equivalent professional identities and education and training traditions, for example, broadcasting and printing, although even here OLMs are no longer as an entrenched feature of these industries as they were in the 196/7/80s (Sutton Trust, 2006). In the main, large swathes of the C&C sector are characterized by ELMs. These markets are formed where the buying and selling of labour is not linked to jobs which form part of a FILM or a long standing and clearly defined OLM. Movement of labour in ELMs is determined by the price attached to the job and/or contract on offer and the requirements of the individual concerned and such jobs/contracts in the creative and cultural industries tend to run the gamut from high to low skill. Traditionally, ELMs were seen as constituting the ’secondary labour market’ and labour market economists tended to treat them as less desirable work contexts for young people than OLMs and FILMs because they did not offer the same form of employment protection and structured opportunities for development (Ashton, 1995, p15).

The impact of globalization, new forms of work and out-sourcing has, however, profoundly increased the prevalence of ELMs within the UK economy in general (Ashton, 1995) and in the creative and cultural sector in particular (Bilton, 2007), with the result that even organizations such as the BBC, which in the past offered its employees permanent contracts, is now inclined to place new recruits on short-term and temporary contracts. The net effect has been the emergence of less structured careers and greater economic uncertainty. Marsden (2008) has characterized this shift from OLMs to ELMs as the introduction of a ‘tournament’ culture in the C&C sector. By this he means aspiring entrants are prepared to seek out a mix of unpaid internships and/or work experiences and tolerate the uncertainties of low-paid freelance work, in the hope that it will enable them to develop the appropriate mix of vocational practice and social capital to secure either a permanent position or longer contracts and better pay as a freelance worker.

Government policy for education and training

The national policy cycle and its implications for E&T policy

The UK’s national policy cycle has been predicated since the late 1980s on a ‘cycle of state intervention’ (Keep, 2006). Both the previous Conservative and New Labour administrations have ascribed a centrality to upskilling that is not shared by other actors, particularly employers, and which render all assumed stakeholders in the upskilling process, for example, educational institutions, Local Learning and Skills Councils (LLSCs), merely as delivery agents for national policy, rather than active contributors to the formulation of public policy. To realise this upskilling agenda, successive governments have engulfed the E&T system with an escalating series of policy dictums which they are obligated to address. These supply-side measures and levers, which reflect the well-established belief amongst policy makers in the efficacy of centrally imposed planning regimes, specify targets, explicitly interface funding, with targets, and severely restrict the scope for any discussion of the direction of policy (Keep, 2006).

The net effect has been to produce a crippling paradox. On the one hand, the UK government’s commitment to free-market neo-liberal policies renders unavailable the potential policy interventions used in other countries – for example, training levies, strong trade unions and statutory rights to collective bargaining on skills, strong forms of social partnership – or a targeted industrial policy to support high skill sectors. On the other hand, the government’s concern to micro-manage all aspects of E&T policy predisposes SSCs and LLSCs to work with the DCSFs to realize national E&T targets by allocating funding in line with those targets, thereby denying them the opportunity to sponsor initiatives which might offer an alternative vision and set of practical measures to facilitate access to the labour market.

This mismatch between demand and supply of E&T has a number of unintended consequences. At present, although the national policy rhetoric constantly affirms the centrality of ‘choice’ and ‘flexibility’ if the UK is to respond to the demands of the knowledge economy, E&T policy is tightly circumscribed by policymakers assumptions there are clear and functioning OLMs and FILMs in all areas of the UK economy whose needs can be met through the creation of sector skills agreements and qualification blueprints. As a consequence, all that the government’s much vaunted rhetoric of choice and flexibility amounts to is an opportunity for the demand-side to tailor pre-given blueprints to reflect their needs. Moreover, when the government encounters opposition to or a reluctance to go along with its E&T agenda, it rarely pauses to consider whether policy is correct for all industrial sectors. Instead, the government tries to realize its goals by offering a limited number of financial inducements, the form of a public subsidy for E&T programmes such as the AAP and task-specific adult training to employers in an attempt to secure greater employer investment in training (Keep, 2006). Consequently, the above labour market assumptions and ideological no-go-zones mean that the UK policy severely restricts stakeholders’ scope to experiment or innovate in relation to their perception of their needs.

Operating within this framework, New Labour’s rallying cry to E&T stakeholders has been that policy must intertwine competitiveness and social inclusion on the grounds that education is the best policy to support employability in, and growth of, the knowledge economy (Lauder, 2004). The emphasis in the first decade of educational policy from 1997 to 2007 fell upon making the supply-side more responsive to government priorities. Firstly, universities were encouraged to address social exclusion by widening participation so as to attract non-traditional learners, for example, learners whose families have little or no previous experience of university study, into HE, rather than to target measures to facilitate access into specific subjects or occupational sectors. Broadly speaking, the widening participation initiatives have been fairly successful in achieving their goals, although non-traditional access tends to have been skewed towards ‘new’ rather than ‘Russell Group’ universities (Burke, 2000). Moreover, new vocational qualifications such as the Foundation Degree (FD) were introduced to address perceived skill deficits at intermediate (associate professional and technical) level and also as a strategy to help the Government to meet its target of ensuring that at least 50% of the population entered HE (DfEs, 2003). FDs have proved to be an effective strategy for ‘credentialising’ high volumes of experienced workers’ knowledge and skill in the public sector (Gallagher and Reeves 2006), and a flexible framework for employers to align degrees more closely to niche needs in the private sector (Evans et al, forthcoming).

Secondly, the government has forced (and continues to force as the announcement on 7.1.2009 demonstrates) the Local Learning and Skills Councils (LLSCs) to present the Apprenticeship/Advanced Apprenticeship Programme (AAP) as a vehicle to attract those young people not proceeding into further and higher education, whom the government perceives to be vulnerable to social and economic exclusion. In this respect, the AAP has become a strategy to secure volumes, in terms of apprentice numbers and participating sectors, rather than on skill formation in those sectors committed to securing economic growth (Fuller and Unwin, 2003). In the past, ‘apprenticeships were demand rather than supply-led. Employers decided when and if they needed apprentices’ (Fuller and Unwin, 2003b). Thus, apprenticeship was very responsive to labour market demand. In contrast, at the present time the prevailing orthodoxy of centrally imposed planning regimes and national targets for education and training, coupled with the nexus of quangos, for example, Sector Skills Councils (SSCs) with responsibility for devising sector skills agreements to deliver those targets and whose livelihood depends on meeting their target quotas, serves to underpin a decidedly supply-side conception of E&T. This has a number of pernicious effects as regards apprenticeship: most employers, despite having a degree of representation on the boards of SSCs and LSCs, and particularly employers in the C&C sector, rarely feel any particular ownership of apprenticeships (Fuller and Unwin, 2003a; Hutton, 2006); and the hands of the SSCs and LSCs are tied as regards financially supporting any new initiatives for learning and development that do not directly support government targets for education and training or their own financial position.

The publication of the Leitch Report (2006), however, inaugurated a shift away from a concern for, on the one hand, incentivising and pressurising the supply-side to respond to government targets and, on the other hand, encouraging individuals to invest in their own training and development. These foci were replaced by a concern to put employers in the driving seat through the Train to Gain initiative and by enhancing the role of the SSCs in order to make the E&T system more demand rather than supply-led (Delorenzi, 2007). Specifically, adult learning policy is now focused on two Public Service Agreements (PSAs) targets – to increase the number of people with basic skills, and to increase the number with level 2 qualifications. Whilst the equity and social justice arguments that underpin a concern for increasing the proportion of the population that have basic skills and hold Level 2 qualifications are unquestionable, the Leitch Report perpetuates the straitjacket that the government has imposed on the E&T system. It fails to acknowledge that the most effective strategy for enhancing regional and national competitiveness is to support adults who already hold Level 3 qualifications to broaden the base of their expertise (Delorenzi, 2007) and that this frequently requires access to short un-accredited provision (Mason, 2008).

The ‘cycle of intervention’ and its implications for the C&C sector

Despite the shift to demand-led E&T that Leitch purportedly inaugurated, the direction of educational policy for the C&C sector continues to remain firmly under the hand of the government. This is, in part, because SSCs and LLSCs in general, and in the C&C sector specifically, perceive that their primary purpose is to function as a delivery agent for government policy, rather than an institutional tier capable of mediating between central government and other groups in the E&T system or even a bulwark against the arms of Whitehall. It is also in part because both organisations are subject to the constantly changing direction and priorities of national E&T policy. This state of affairs is clearly evident from the way in which Skillset, who represents broadcasting, film, video and multimedia, and Creative and Cultural Skills (C&CS), who represent advertising, crafts, cultural heritage, design, music, performing, literary and visual arts, have either responded to their E&T remits or have in the case of HE been affected by other aspects of policy.

In the case of HE, C&C-related degrees have been growing annually since 1994 and resulted in a 55% increase in enrolments in creative and art and design subject areas by 2005 (Universities UK, 2005). Moreover, this growth continues independent of any action on behalf of either of Skillset or C&CS. This is partly because universities have or have established strong links with the C&C sector and therefore have been able to identify/respond to emerging demands. Nevertheless, despite universities’ close links with the C&C sector, studying for a C&C-related degree rarely provides an expectation or understanding of what is required in vocational contexts (Raffo et al, 2000). Hence many graduates with C&C degrees have a post-graduation ‘vocational need’: to acquire the ‘vocational practice’, that is the mix of knowledge, skill and judgement, employers are looking for, via a mix of unpaid internships, work placements, etc (Guile, 2009).

The one, albeit small, area of influence SSCs have in relation to HE is with respect to the design of FDs. Here some very successful, albeit very low volume, FDs have been designed, for example, Skillset and the London College of Communication’s FD in Media Practice. This FD has a strong track record of assisting new entrants and ‘career switchers’ to gain access to their desired niche in the C&C sector (Evans et al forthcoming). The FD’s success is due to its ability to offer learners work placements in the heart of the UK’s C&C sector. This assists them to develop not only their vocational practice, but also the social capital in the form of a network of contacts who might offer them or recommend them for contract/project-based employment.

In the case of apprenticeship, Skillset and C&CS are struggling to persuade employers to participate in the AAP. The C&C sector lags significantly behind traditional sectors associated with apprenticeship such as Engineering, Manufacturing and Construction as well as other non-traditional sectors such as Business Administration. There was not one C&C industry in the list of the ‘top ten’ participants in the AAP (Fuller and Unwin, 2003) and this situation has not subsequently improved; moreover, even in the list of the ‘top forty’ sectors where apprentices begin at age 18 and over, the C&C sector is only represented by industries which have either historically been characterized by a combination of strong OLMs and FILMs, for example, broadcasting and newspapers or recent high growth sectors such as IT where certain segments have developed fairly robust OLMs and FILMs over the last two decades.

This is partly because the flexible blueprints and the provision of a public subsidy has failed to encourage participation in the AAP on behalf of those sectors that are characterized by a high proportion of SMEs, very strong ELMs, and little history of involvement in nationally accredited apprenticeship programmes such as Art and Design, Film, Fashion, Film, Music, New Media, Performing Arts, etc. SMEs are reluctant to participate in the AAP because firstly, they lack the financial and human resources to be convinced that they would benefit from participating in the AAP (Hutton, 2006). Secondly, the mandatory qualification outcomes in the blueprint for AAP – NVQs, Technical Certificates and Key Skills – are perceived in the sector as serving ‘educational’ goals because they are promoted by the DCSF to enhance academic progression, rather than attempts to develop sectorally-relevant vocational knowledge and skill (Guile and Okumoto, 2007). Thirdly, the onus from central government on SSCs and LLSCs to secure high volumes and to roll out apprenticeship frameworks nationally severely inhibits them from supporting employers’ demands for bespoke apprenticeships. SSCs are reluctant therefore to invest in such schemes because they are not guaranteed to offer a sufficient return on the investment when it comes to achieving AAP targets. As a consequence, it took over four years, for example, for the first ever Advanced Apprenticeship in Media Production, which was developed by Skillset in collaboration with the BBC, North West Vision and Media and the LSC, to be launched (Damners, 2008).

Skillset and C&CS have both supported the development of the first creative and cultural Diploma. This is a new qualification that was launched in September 2008. Its aim is to promote diversity, opportunity and inclusion by offering pathways to support learners to enter occupational sectors or progress into HE, including work-related learning opportunities (Huddlestone, 2008). The Diploma in Creative and Media (DCM) has therefore to square the government’s circle of developing vocationally relevant skills and positioning learners to progress at some point in the future into HE. Although it is too soon to judge on the basis of any empirical evidence, the exigencies of the C&C labour market described in the previous section suggest that achieving this goal is a tall order. The DCM promotes the impression that intermediate-level qualifications are the stepping-stone to employment in the C&C sector. Yet, it is clear that not only is access to the C&C sector difficult for people who hold a degree, but also difficult to sustain a career in the sector (Galloway et al, 2006; Lindley and Galloway, 2005; Guile and Okumoto, 2006). For this reason, graduates and recent entrants often resort to ‘multiple job holding’ to supplement their income stream whilst they break in or establish themselves in their chosen niche (Baines and Robson 1999; Creigh-Tyte and Thomas 1999). Thus, Skillset and C&CS run the risk of inadvertently increasing social frustration rather than assisting young people to achieve their social aspirations, as young people discover that DCM does not necessarily constitute a qualification to secure their employment in the C&C sector.

The root of the problem that Skillset and C&CS jointly face is the assumed link that the government believes exists between qualifications and access to the labour market. This is predicated on a notion that there are functioning OLMs and FILMs in the C&C sector, that these labour markets will channel the flow of highly qualified students towards their preferred occupational destinations, and that employers will use qualifications as a proxy measure for vocational practice in the recruitment process (Guile, 2009). These assumptions are, s we have seen, wide of the mark and, as a consequence, Skillset and C&CS’s efforts to support aspiring entrants to gain access to the C&C sector are floundering.

New spaces, pedagogies and expertise

Given this difficulty, aspiring entrants have recourse to two main strategies to gain access to the sector: to exercise their own agency and identify and negotiate internships and work placement to develop their vocational practice and social capital, or to participate in the development activities that ‘intermediary agencies’ offer (Guile and Okumoto, forthcoming). These agencies have grown in number over the last decade as it has become apparent that aspiring entrants require help post-graduation to realise their ambitions (Guile and Okumoto, forthcoming). The term intermediary agencies encompass a diverse range of organisations. Some are found in (i) the formal education sector, for example, education-industry liaison units in universities (ii) the not-for-profit sector, private companies with a sectoral specialization, and possibly some industry funding, providing a range of learning and development programmes for aspiring entrants and longstanding members of their field (iii) the non-formal sector, colleges that do not receive statutory funding, and (iv) the public sector, for example, local government funded community-liaison agencies.

Intermediary agencies are rather different from traditional forms of community education (CE) that is usually delivered by cohorts of trained educators employed by local authorities (Tett, 2002). In contrast, intermediary agencies attempt to co-ordinate segments of the labour market by acting as catalysts to bring conglomerates, SMEs, freelancers and networks together to forge partnerships. The aim of these partnerships is two-fold: to assist aspiring entrants to supplement their qualifications or prior experience to develop the forms of vocational practice and social capital that will help them enter the creative industries, and to increase the flow of experienced people into the sector. Over the last decade, they have achieved this goal by:

• securing funds from sources such as the European Union, UK government departments, charitable foundations and the private sector to provide new spaces for learning. These can include (i) the provision of short courses that usually do not result in a recognized qualification (ii) offering bursaries/access to master classes, and (iii) negotiating internships/work placements with companies
• employing experienced professionals such as tutors/mentors to support aspiring entrants in ways that are appropriate to the needs of the sector
• working closely with employers and educational institutions to design innovative forms of education and training that address pressing skill needs.

The next section of the paper illustrates the vital contributions that intermediary organisations make by summarising research from four case studies undertaken as part of The Last Mile Project (Guile, 2006). This was a three-year project funded via the EU EQUAL Programme.

One example of the work of an industry-education funded intermediary agency is the Jewellery Industry Innovation Centre (JIIC). The JIIC is attached to the University of Central England, Birmingham and has a remit to provide support in research and development in the UK jewellery industry. The jewellery industry presents aspiring entrants with a very specific kind of challenge. Much of this sector depends upon a value network of ‘horizontal’ collaboration between SMEs and freelancers who create new products and services, and ‘vertical’ collaboration between large firms who act as suppliers and distributors (Bilton, 2007). This generates a pattern of economic activity based on local ties where SMEs and freelancers are committed to the creation of new jewellery products and the larger firms are concerned with their manufacture and distribution.

Working in partnership with the Innovation Unit (IU), part of Birmingham City Council’s Economic and Development Department, and funds secured from the European Social Fund, the JIIC designed a new un-accredited project – the Design Work Placement (DWP) Project. This project ran for six months and based on a three-way partnership (a) participating manufacturers gave recently qualified jewellers an opportunity to develop a new range of commercial products based on their research because they had faith in the JIIC’s track record in identifying new talent (b) recently qualified jewellers worked for a small bursary in order to learn how to incubate (ie create, cost, and monitor the fabrication of their designs) because they appreciated that this would provide an invaluable opportunity to develop their vocational practice and their social capital within the sector, and (c) the JIIC acted as project managers and mentors for the participant jewellers (Guile and Okumoto 2008).

The scheme involved an iterative mix of learning strategies. The JIIC ran workshops to support the recently qualified jewellers to develop an industry-relevant approach to designing new jewellery collections. It introduced them to more commercially-orientated methods of working, encouraging them to attune themselves more to the way in which cultural trends influence how people incorporate jewellery into their fashion style, supported the process through one-to-one mentoring, and ran showcasing events with industry representatives for the participants at the end of the project. The jewellery companies provided the participating jewellers with, on the one hand, very demanding commercial projects, for example, graduates enrolled on jewellery degrees usually have a whole term to produce the final design for their degree whereas the company expected forty new designs to be produced within twelve weeks, which the companies expected to be manufactured within the next twelve weeks; and, on the other hand, opportunities to become familiar with up-to-date techniques of production that they had never encountered in college and to participate in production planning meetings. The aspiring jewellers had to learn to take advantage of this mix of formal pedagogic strategies and workplace-generated pedagogic strategies in order to formulate and instantiate their designs.

In addition to achieving its stipulated goal of assisting the participating companies to enhance their product ranges and the participating jewellers to develop their vocational practice, the DWP also achieved another goal. It assisted the participating jewellers to decide whether to remain a jewellery designer and as a consequence become a freelance worker, or to enter management within a jewellery company and therefore be in a better position to secure a full-time position. Moreover, the jewellers who took the former decision recognised that life as a freelancer required them to develop what has been referred to as ‘moebius-strip’ expertise (Guile, 2007), that is the entrepreneurial expertise to demonstrate to national and international jewellery companies and journalists that they are sufficiently versatile to use their expertise to meet the requirements of any contract.

The work of Slough Borough Council’s Arts Development Team (ADT), which is a regional arts partnership receiving some core funding from the local council to ensure that the arts in Slough have the best grounding, resources and connections, is an excellent example of how the networking undertaken by intermediary agencies can result in innovative strategies to facilitate access into the C&C sector. Because the UK’s four largest film studios are located within fifteen minutes of Slough, Creative Academy (CA), one of ADT’s partners, prioritized film as an industrial sector where they were keen to secure employer support to assist young people from the Slough area to gain access to the industry. This led George Kirkham, Director of CA, to meet Carlo Dusi, Director of Aria Films, and negotiate work placements for ten aspiring entrants on Carlo’s forthcoming production.

Carlo was responsive to George’s pitch for work placements because he was aware that ‘the film production community is not a nurturing one’ and that it is difficult ‘to establish a career in the industry unless one can find an opportunity to work within the industry (Guile and Okumoto forthcoming). The aim of the partnership between Aria and CA was to enable people with Level 3/4 qualifications in a film-related field, for example, Special Effects, Make-up Design or Television and Production, or people who had experience of working in television and/or on the production of advertisements, to move into the film industry. To realize this goal, Carlo offered them a two-week work placement on either the ’shoot’ or the post-production for the film he was producing Kill Kill Faster Faster. The film was shot in Rotterdam for six weeks in June/July 2006 with the budget of £3.7 million. Seven participants undertook technical positions in Rotterdam, while three were involved in post-production work in London once the filming was complete.

Given that Carlos’s film crew had no previous experience of supporting interns on a film shoot and the participants equally lacked any experience of such work, George and Carlo devised a multi-faceted system to support both parties. Prior to the Rotterdam shoot, the CA ran a series of workshops to support the participants in understanding the aims of the scheme, and prepared for their roles through one-to-one meetings with experienced professionals in the field of lighting, filming, sound, etc. During the shooting, the CA offered on-site mentoring support by visiting the participants and helping to iron out any misunderstandings and/or difficulties that arose. Post-placement, the CA arranged for information on seminars, events and job vacancies to be sent to the interns. Prior to the participants arriving in Rotterdam, Carlo briefed the experienced technical staff that he had recruited for the film as regards his rationale for agreeing to provide work placements, explained his expectations of the interns’ ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ role, and the technical staff’s coaching and modeling role. Subsequently, he split his time between overseeing the production process and acting as the participants’ mentor throughout the shoot and post-production phases.

This work placement supported the participants in developing their vocational practice and social capital in order to be in a position for an employer to offer them a contract for their services. In the case of the former, the placement demonstrated that although film-related qualifications can provide a conceptual understanding and orientate aspiring entrants towards key issues about the history and social conventions that inform film-making, such knowledge has to be supplemented by experience of practice. This is because much of the knowledge that is an integral feature of forms of vocational practice such as sound, lighting, direction, is invested in action, and involves developing the form of judgement that are inimical to professional performance. In the case of the latter, the opportunity to hear experienced professionals’ ‘war stories’ about which film events to attend and which networks to join, enabled participants to realised the link between vocational practice, social capital and moebius-strip expertise: the latter provides the network that may generate a demand for their services providing they are perceived as someone who can creatively deploy their expertise in a range of situations.

One example of the work of a non-formal intermediary agency is WAC Performing Arts and Media College. WAC specialises in the field of performing arts and raises its income from a mix of EU, Local Learning and Skills Council, and industry sources of funding. In recognition that many of its graduates, who were active in the field of world arts, were unable to supplement their freelance income streams through securing employment as a teacher/teaching assistant because they lacked a recognized qualification, WAC decided to create a degree in world art forms. To do so, WAC turned to the framework provided by Foundation Degrees (FD).

WAC drew on its accumulated experience in running non-accredited courses and designed the FD around an integrated learning-teaching curriculum (Guile and Okumoto 2009). The hallmark of this curriculum was the way in which WAC mobilised its accumulated social capital (ie the number of ex-WAC graduates who were experienced professionals in the field of world arts forms) to work as teachers. Their involvement enabled participants to develop their vocational practice to industry-standards as well as to expand their network of contacts and thus position them to gain access to the performing arts’ notoriously tricky external labour markets. WAC achieved these two goals by using the expertise of its staff and ex-graduates to (i) explain the discipline-based knowledge and skill that underpins different world art forms in ways that extended their existing vocational practice and developed their professional identity and confidence (ii) provide opportunities for learners to plan and then perform in a wide range of contexts and for culturally diverse audiences. This opportunity to participate legitimately, albeit peripherally, with a range of different world art forms in authentic settings enabled participants to develop the forms of judgement that are integral to the development of their practice, and (iii) provide opportunities for learners to bridge and link their existing fledgling network to other existing and successful networks.

The wide variety of learning opportunities enabled FD participants to firstly, develop new forms of vocational practice and bridge and link their existing and new social capital in ways that could, in future, result in them being invited to contribute their specific vocational expertise to a dance, music, etc, contract that others had secured. Secondly, the diverse learning opportunities also positioned the FDs’ participants to develop the entrepreneurial expertise to start looking at themselves as not just performers searching for contracts for their specific world art expertise, but also as arts practitioners who have developed broader-based capabilities that could assist them to secure employment in art-based project management and/or community education.

Finally, the partnership between Birmingham’s Innovation Unit (IU) and the city’s Repertory Theatre (REP) provides an excellent example of how to devise an innovative project to assist aspiring entrants enter the C&C labour market. Using ESF funding, the IU and REP developed a ‘Technical Apprenticeship’ (TA) that offered eight apprentices, none of whom held a qualification above Level 3, to successfully enter the C&C sector. The Rep devised the TA outside the national blueprint for apprenticeship for two main reasons. It felt that the AAP had firstly, been designed to serve ‘educational’ goals because it is promoted by the DfES to enhance academic progression, rather than as genuine attempts to develop the sector-specific vocational knowledge and skill that they feel it is important for apprentices to develop (Guile and Okumoto 2007). Secondly, work in the theatre (and, for that matter, live events in general) is characterised by a ‘project culture’. This work context means that the AAP with its attendant package of NVQ assessment and the requirement for day-release is not a practical option, because it is utterly impracticable to release apprentices to attend courses in FE colleges or private training providers or to stop and assess apprentices’ competence in the middle of a production. To do so would deny the apprentices the opportunity to develop key aspects of vocational practice which are unlikely to surface again within the life span of a production.

To realize its vision of creating a modern culturally diverse and inclusive traditional craft apprenticeship which reflects the realities of the new work context in which it operates, the Rep appointed a Project Coordinator, John Pitt, who had worked as Production Manager previously in the Rep as well as having extensive knowledge and experience in training and development. Working with the Technical Heads of Department (THDs), for example, Lighting, Costume, Wigs, Sound, etc, John designed an apprenticeship that immersed apprentices in the ‘work flow’ of the Rep theatre life so they are involved in every stage of mounting a production. John negotiated with the THDs for the apprentices to have the opportunity to be: (i) ‘legitimate peripheral participants’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991) within their department, that is, activity engaged with the production process and supported in situ by modeling and demonstration activities in order to develop their technical expertise, and (ii) ‘boundary crossers’ (Tuomi-Gröhn and Engeström, 2003) between departments, that is, provided with opportunities to grasp the connections between different forms of vocational practice that exist within the Rep and how they all contribute to the success of a performance.

John also arranged for the apprentices to enhance their on-the-job learning in the down-time between productions by offering them access to a bespoke curriculum consisting of a mix of generic knowledge and skill about the process of production, and occupationally-specific knowledge and skill relating to their technical specialism. Furthermore a programme of limited work rotation and visits to other theatres and events across the country were arranged. These experiences enabled the apprentices to locate their understanding of vocational practice in a wider context and lay the foundation for them to transfer their knowledge and skill into other theatrical contexts.

The Rep’s model of apprenticeship supported the apprentices’ skill formation and transfer because it not only developed distinctive forms of occupationally-specific knowledge and skill which are in short supply and hence for which there is a high demand in the global C&C economy, but it also developed their social capital and entrepreneurial ability. Recognising that the UK’s national system of repertory theatres is characterised by the type of strong mutually self-supporting networks, characterised by high levels of trust amongst all levels of specialism and seniority, the Rep bridged and linked their apprentices into as many of these networks as possible. They did so in the knowledge that, on the one hand, these networks would accept that an apprentice ‘trained’ at Birmingham Rep was well trained and sufficiently experienced to be offered a contract for their services; and, on the other hand, that the apprentices had acquired the ability to demonstrate to prospective employers that they were sufficiently versatile to operate effectively in a range of settings, for example, theatres, television studios and live events.

Coda to the Case Studies: all the participants are now active in the C&C sector with contracts for their services.

Learning to work in the C&C sector: future challenges

The future context

The trend away from OLMs and FILMs and towards ELMs and ‘tournament’ competitions is likely to continue rather than diminish, for a number of reasons, over the next ten years. Firstly, this trend, although not necessarily as pronounced and entrenched in other parts of Europe, is nevertheless occurring globally throughout the C&C sector. The net effect is to position aspiring entrants to the C&C sector, as the EU commissioned report from KEA (2006) observes, as “new workers”/”new entrepreneurs”, between capital and labour because:

“The traditional categories of the “full-time job society” (“here the worker, there the employer”) no longer apply; the cultural content worker is suddenly also a (cultural) entrepreneur (without capital). In academic literature the “new worker” is described as multi-skilled, multifunctional and flexible in working time as well as often being self-employed” (KEA, 2006, p91).

Secondly, policymakers continue to affirm the importance of expanding these industries without paying any attention to labour market conditions and the way in which they inhibit people from learning to work in the C&C sector (Hesmondhalgh, forthcoming). Even the KEA (2006, p9) report that has, as we have seen above, very presciently identified the new conditions in which aspirant workers find themselves, falls back on the current European Union version of the UK conventional wisdom and argues that workers will require higher levels of knowledge and skill. Thus the report ends up perpetuating, rather than offering any fresh thinking on how to overcome, the dilemma described in this paper.

This suggests that the transition of any young people into the labour market, which many researchers had noted even before the impact of the ‘credit crunch’ had become more extended than in the post-war period during the 1990s (Evans, 2000; Chisholm, 1999), is likely to become even more extended in the future. Moreover, given the opacity of the C&C labour market and the fact that access is dependent on the development of the forms of social capital that provide people with access to the networks that gate-keep and facilitate employment in the C&C sector, it also suggests that access is likely to become even more competitive as the C&C sector gradually comes to terms with the implications of the ‘credit crunch’.

Assuming that the depiction of the above trends is correct and that the mismatch between the UK’s national policy cycle and the government’s assumptions about the role of qualifications as a proxy measure for vocational practice continues, then access to the labour market is likely to be exacerbated rather than diminished in any great respect. In the case of graduates, this is in part because the massification of higher education has generated a continual flow of graduates who are prepared, because they are financially cushioned by their families or are prepared to engage in multiple job-holding, to accept fairly insecure and temporary positions in an attempt to develop the forms of vocational practice and social capital to gain access to the C&C labour market (Oakley, 2007). In the case of students holding Level 3 qualifications, the combination of the flexible conditions of the UK labour market, coupled with employers’ preferences to recruit graduates in non-graduate roles (Mason, 2004), is exerting considerable ‘downward’ pressure on such students and has the effect of denying them access to the port-of-entry positions that would otherwise be commensurable with their qualifications and experience. Taken in combination, these developments suggest that there is likely to be an increased demand for the forms of intervention activity and provision of learning and development activities that intermediary agencies have been providing.

New principles for E&T

In light of these circumstances and irrespective of any change of government, there will have to be new direction to E&T policy if policymakers are to support aspiring entrants and career-switchers to realize their ambitions to work in the C&C sector and support the sector to continue to serve as the ‘engine’ of post-industrial growth in the UK. Based on the argument presented in this paper, this new direction presupposes a series of new principles for UK E&T policy. The principles are as follows:

1. The rebalancing of the tension between market (ie ‘demand-led) and state (ie supply-led) provision through the introduction of ‘heterarchical’ (Jessop, 1998) modes of E&T planning and delivery.

The problem generated by the state/market dichotomy in governance strategies has been widely recognized for some time. Jessop (1998, 2000) has argued that this has resulted at the macro government level in the constant substitution of one with another. He argues that rather than trying to manage the relative change between states, markets and globalization within one overall structure, what is required is the introduction of ‘new balancing points’ that enable policymakers to involve stakeholders more directly in the coordination process. Jessop offers the principle of self-organisation, in his terms’ heterarchy’, as an alternative mode of governance. From Jessop’s perspective, heterarchical governance, coupled with the autonomy at the regional level to determine how to deploy national fundings streams, offers a potential key to unlock the totality of the state/market interface at the macro-level.

There is not sufficient space here to do justice to the complexity of Jessop’s argument. I want to suggest, however, that his notion of heterarchical governance can be usefully extended to the way in which E&T policy and provision could be addressed in future in the C&C sector. This claim can be illustrated by returning to the example of Birmingham Reparatory Theatre’s Technical Apprenticeship.

It was argued earlier that in its desire to make apprenticeship part of a vocational ladder within the education and training (E&T) system, the government firstly, overlooked that (i) the primary purpose of apprenticeship is to develop vocational practice, and (ii) the project-based nature of work in much of the creative and cultural sector requires a ‘project-based’ approach to education and training and that existing arrangements and funding patterns for on-and-off-the-job training are incompatible with this type of work. Secondly, the government imposed a policy making cycle, funding constraints and targets that totally limited the scope of regional stakeholders to respond in innovative ways to their pressing needs.

If the principle of heterarchy was used to rebalance the current E&T system, this broadening of the principles of governance would offer E&T stakeholders the opportunity to ‘co-configure’ (Engeström, 2008) innovative solutions to the issue of access. In the case of the reservations expressed in the C&C sector about the AAP Blueprint, this new space could be used to enable employers, working in conjunction with intermediary agencies and Further Education Colleges, to design models of apprenticeship that actually reflect their needs. Such a development would introduce a slightly different twist to the notion of ‘employer leadership’ advocated by the Leitch Report. Instead of assuming that qualification blueprints are the definitive solution to employability in the knowledge economy and arguing that employers should take the lead over FE colleges/training providers implementing the AAP Blueprint, this broader system of E&T governance would create the conditions for employers to develop bespoke models of apprenticeship based on a clear articulation and specification of the principles of occupational skill formation and skill transfer. To ensure that employers do not interpret this new freedom as a license to create a host of new ‘restrictive’ apprenticeships (Fuller and Unwin, 2003), Local Learning and Skills Councils could be required by central government to devise regional ‘kite marking’ systems for such alternative models of apprenticeship. These systems would be based on clearly defined criteria for skill formation, skill transfer and employability so that apprentices developed the requisite form of vocational practice and social capital, thereby reassuring policymakers that the new schemes are educationally robust and offer value for money.

The introduction of these new principles of governance would also mean that E&T funding regimes for apprenticeship and other programmes would have to be re-thought. At present policymakers operate with ‘Welfarist’ notions of labour markets (ie that all employers will or can be persuaded to recruit regular numbers on an annually recurring basis), and ‘Fordist’ mechanisms to control the E&T system (ie funding FE Colleges and private training providers on the basis of enrolling ‘training volumes’ and achieving ‘training completions’). These assumptions about the operation of the labour market and this accountability and funding model is completely at odds with the growth of ELMs and project work in the C&C sector, let alone elsewhere in the economy. Heterarchical principles of governance would involve a shift away from these centrally controlled auditing and funding mechanism. Instead they would require the devolution of budgetry oversight to regional E&T stakeholders and the provision of ring-fenced budgets to support E&T innovation. These conditions would provide E&T stakeholders with the relative autonomy to design bespoke E&T solutions that reflect the needs of the C&C sector at the regional level.

2. Reconceptualising ‘vertical’ (ie education to work) and ”horizontal’ (ie work/unemployment to work) transitions as the development of vocational practice, social capital and moebius strip expertise rather than the acquisition of qualifications.

The recent debate about the role of qualifications and access to the labour market has forgotten that although qualifications are important because they are the long standing way to certify the forms of knowledge and skill students acquired in education, they do not constitute proxy measures for vocational practice, social capital or entrepreneurial ability, despite policymakers and some researchers views to the contrary. Moreover, policymakers have also failed to detect that the growth of ELMs is creating a new type of post-degree vocational need – opportunities for graduates to supplement the forms of knowledge and skill certified by qualifications with opportunities for vocational enculturation and the development of social capital and entrepreneurial ability – an issue that does not currently figure in the post-Leitch E&T agenda.

It has long been recognized that vocational practice, social capital and entrepreneurial expertise cannot be broken down into discrete units of study and taught independent of any contact with workplaces. This is not to suggest that study and simulation cannot provide a grounding and inspiration for learners, rather it is an acknowledgement that vocational practice, social capital and entrepreneurial expertise have to be developed in situ, that is in conditions of work or through the provision of opportunities to gain access to networks and specialist advice, rather than through study or simulation.

Enacting this insight, however, presupposes a further shift in the government’s E&T policy. It requires the introduction of a more multifaceted and differentiated strategy based on an explicit recognition of the different contribution that the following activities play in facilitating access to the C&C sector. They are:

• accreditation activities (ie academic or vocational qualifications)

• industry-recognised activities (ie knowledge and skill acquired from non-accredited activities such as work placements, internships, master classes)
• network activities (ie the development of a personal occupational labour market as the basis of securing contracts and the forms of entrepreneurial expertise to promote oneself in ELMs).

The first step to implement this strategy is for the government to stop predetermining the type of output (ie qualifications), the type of provider (i.e. Colleges of Further Education and accredited training providers) and the funding regime for all aspects of E&T. The second step is to relax the reigns of policy and offer all E&T stakeholders the opportunity brokered bespoke E&T solutions, for example, identifying how to incorporate, what this paper has referred to as access to industry-recognised and networked activities either as integral parts of accredited programmes (see the WAC Case Study) or as part of non-accredited programmes (see the CA and JIIC Case Studies). Because these activities develop vocational practice and social capital in a way that educational programmes in colleges and universities struggle to do so, they need to become a supplement to the national E&T framework of provision rather than a marginal, albeit highly effective, way of supporting transition into the labour market.

3. A shift from conceiving learning as consisting of the accumulation of pre-specified outcomes to seeing it as the development of judgement.

In addition to the UK’s tendency to conceive learning as consisting of the accumulation of pre-specified outcomes, the introduction of the European Qualification Framework (EQF) is resulting in pressure on educational institutions to standardise qualifications throughout Europe through the use of programme specifications and learning outcomes. This development is likely to reaffirm the idea pan-Europe that qualifications constitute a proxy measure for vocational practice and hence access to the C&C sector. This is deeply worrying because, as the case studies presented in the paper demonstrate, the knowledge associated with any field of vocational practice is always broader than any qualification. It requires opportunities for people to ‘conduct inquiries’ rather ‘rehearse procedures’ and, in the process, to develop the forms of judgement that are inimical to practice (Sennett, 2008).

What is required, therefore, is the formulation of a language of description for vocational practice that will offer researchers, policymakers and practitioners a resource to identify the different contributions that accredited, industry-recognised and network activities make to supporting vertical and horizontal transitions into the labour market. The first step towards such a language of description has already been taken (Guile, 2009). It has resulted in the formulation of three concepts of vocational practice. They are the evolutionary (ie the gradual development of a practice through individual and collective agentic activity), laterally-branching (ie the explicit use of professional/vocational field-specific forms of knowledge and skill (ie codified and non-codified) to develop a practice in ways that can be recognised in the field, and envisioning (ie inter-professional activity to envision a new form of practice).

These conceptions offer a way to capture the different modalities of practice and the forms of judgement associated with them. They could be used by E&T stakeholders to (i) identify the forms of working and learning that have to occur outside of educational institutions to facilitate their development; (ii) consider how to build strategic partnerships at the regional level to provide people with access to these forms of working and learning, and (iii) to press the case for the greater recognition for pedagogic activity within national and international E&T policy formation.

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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.

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.

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

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

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

2. Embodiment

2.1 Embodied Cognition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2.2 Embodied interaction

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

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

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

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

2.3 Implications for knowledge, creativity and communication

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

3. Intersection with Technology

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

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

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

Table 1. Table of ‘hot’ research topics.

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

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

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

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

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

3.1 Implications for knowledge, creativity and communication

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Technology-based learning research

4.1 Physical space

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

(A) Cuisinaire rods

(B) Golden blocks

Fig. 1 – traditional manipulatives

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

4.1.1 Physical interaction

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

4.1.2 Interacting with physical objects

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

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

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

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

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

4.1.3 Interacting across physical spaces

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

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

4.2 Virtual space

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

4.2.1 Creativity

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

4.2.2 Performance

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

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

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

4.2.3 Communication

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

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

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

4.3 Intersection between physical and virtual space

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

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

5. Discussion

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

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

5.1 Scenario 1: Embedded experiences

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

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

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

5.2 Scenario 2: Shareable interfaces

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

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

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

5.3 General challenges, demands and risks across scenarios

Key challenges and demands

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

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

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

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

Key risks

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

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

6. Conclusion

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