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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Collective vs. individual memory

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. The ‘memory wars’

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Memory and history

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Embodied memory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Mediated memory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summary

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

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

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

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

In recent decades, many OECD member countries have undergone a transformation from an industrial to a knowledge economy (Bell, 1973; Drucker, 1993). The knowledge economy is based on “the production and distribution of knowledge and information, rather than the production and distribution of things” (Drucker, 1993, p182). Knowledge workers manipulate symbols rather than machines, and create conceptual artifacts rather than physical objects (Bereiter, 2002; Drucker, 1993; Reich, 1991). These analysts emphasize the importance of creativity, innovation, and ingenuity in the knowledge economy; some scholars now refer to today’s economy as a creative economy (Florida, 2002; Howkins, 2001).

We are entering an age of innovation, and creativity will grow in importance due to several broad societal and economic trends:

1. Increasingly globalized markets result in greater competitiveness, even for industries that historically had been protected from significant challenge

2. Increasingly sophisticated information and communication technologies result in shorter product development cycles, increasing the pace of innovation and change

3. Increasingly sophisticated information technology is spreading the scope of automation into sectors of the economy that formerly required active human involvement, including increasingly advanced service and knowledge work, thus obsoleting those job categories that do not involve active, daily creativity

4. Global labor market competition has resulted in low-skill, low-creativity jobs moving to extremely low-wage countries such that OECD labor forces can no longer compete

5. Increasing wealth and leisure time in OECD countries (and beyond) have increased the demand for the products of the creative industries. As of 2007, the creative industries represented over 11% of U.S. GDP (Gantchev, 2007).

These trends result in regional, economic, and organizational shifts – such as flexible specialization, regional economies structured around a loose network of small producers, and short product runs – that place creativity at a premium (Jeffcutt and Pratt, 2002, p. 226).

An economic school of thought known as new growth theory argues that creativity and idea generation are central to today’s economy; the driver of economic growth is technological change (Cortright, 2001; Lucas, 1988; Romer, 1990; Solow, 1956, 1994). In this view, knowledge is an intrinsic part of the economic system – a third factor, added to the traditional two of labor and capital (Florida, 2002; Romer, 1990). Peters and Humes (2003) noted that “economic progress and expansion has always depended on new ideas and innovation … What has changed, perhaps, is that knowledge is now recognized as being at least as important as capital (physical and financial)” (p1). New growth theory implies that those nations that thrive will be the ones that succeed at innovation – generating and applying new knowledge.

The creative industries have been defined by the UK Department of Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) as “those activities which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property” (DCMS, 1998); these sectors include advertising, designer fashion, film, video-games, and architecture and art. In the UK, national policy since the late 1990s has emphasized the creative industries as part of a broader strategy of becoming a “competitive knowledge economy” (DTI, 1999; NACCCE, 1999).

However, new growth theory suggests that all industries today necessarily involve creativity (eg Jefcutt and Pratt, 2002). In the age of innovation, creativity is of concern not only for economic sectors traditionally thought to involve creativity. OECD nations have responded by developing national policies “for encouraging knowledge generation, knowledge acquisition, knowledge diffusion, and the exploitation of knowledge” in science, research, and education (Peters and Humes, 2003, p2). Concrete efforts fall into two broad categories: enhancing the knowledge-generating potential of society, and reforming educational institutions to deliver learning that supports creative work.

To enhance the knowledge-generating potential of society, countries focus on the identification of institutional, societal, and communication structures that foster the diffusion and exploitation of knowledge. Organizational systems that foster retention and dissemination of knowledge are referred to as knowledge management systems. National systems that foster retention and dissemination of knowledge include infrastructure efforts that bring people together – transportation and communication networks.

To deliver learning that supports creative work – through schools and also in lifelong learning – national governments have focused on educational institutions. How might such institutions be reformed to most effectively foster learning for creativity? Information delivery is not enough – educational institutions need to prepare individuals to generate new knowledge. And because knowledge grows and changes so rapidly, learning must continue through the lifespan. The educational system must expand beyond compulsory formal schooling.

Since the first OECD report on the knowledge economy in 1996, the OECD played a leading role in exploring the implications of this shift:

OECD analysis is increasingly directed to understanding the dynamics of the knowledge-based economy and its relationship to traditional economics, as reflected in ‘new growth theory’. The growing codification of knowledge and its transmission through communications and computer networks has led to the emerging ‘information society’. The need for workers to acquire a range of skills and to continuously adapt these skills underlies the ‘learning economy’. The importance of knowledge and technology diffusion requires better understanding of knowledge networks and ‘national innovation systems’. (OECD, 1996; emphasis in original)

In the years following this prescient report, OECD’s CERI project generated a series of reports about the implications of this historic shift for educational institutions (OECD, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004).

In the first half of this report, I present a brief summary of recent research on creativity, collaboration, and learning, to provide an important background to the task of envisioning possible futures. I then identify five factors that shape a multi-dimensional space of possible futures: technology, customization of learning, diffusion of learning, organizational learning and innovation, and the role of educational professionals. Then I draw on recent research and these five factors to elaborate on six scenarios that were first presented in What Schools for the Future? (OECD, 2001).

Broadening our conceptions of creativity

Psychological research on creativity-from the 1960s focus on personality, through the 1970s and 1980s focus on cognition-have been limited to creative outputs that are highly valued in the West: fine art painting, basic science, and symphonic compositions. As a result, the exceptional creators that have been studied have been those who have excelled in one of these traditional European genres. In his 1993 book Creating Minds, Howard Gardner discussed seven exemplary creators: Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, (T.S.) Eliot, (Martha) Graham, and Gandhi. In his 1996 book Creativity, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi interviewed 100 exceptional creators, almost all of whom attained their eminence through science or the fine arts.

These forms of creativity will play an important role in the creative societies of the future. But from an education and policy making perspective, these forms are unlikely to provide leverage for increasing the overall creativity of a society and an economy; specifically, they represent a small fraction of the overall revenues accruing to the creative industries. Pratt (2004) has argued that the term “creative industries” implies an individualistic view, such that artsy types are the “creatives” and others are not; thus he prefers the term “cultural industries”. The focus on fine art painting has resulted in a neglect of filmmaking, graphic arts (including website design), and animation (including video-games). The focus on basic science has resulted in a neglect of applied science, engineering, and technology, the source of many financially successful innovations. The focus on art music has resulted in a neglect of improvisational performance, of rock bands, of electronica, and music videos – all of which have substantially broader societal dissemination as well as larger economic impacts.

The traditional response has been to argue that high art forms represent the purest essence of the human creative impulse, and that these “lower” forms are made less pure by their revenue-generating potential. But this traditional response is almost impossible to defend any more, when artists themselves have been increasingly challenging this hierarchy and these divisions. In the 1960s, pop artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein broke the boundaries between high and low art, incorporating elements of advertising graphics and comic strips into their paintings. The Fluxus group began experimenting with performance and installation art, and in the following decades, installation art has become increasingly dominant within the mainstream art world. In the 1970s, the New Hollywood era in film was a major creative break in movie production. In the 1980s, the advent of MTV and its music videos enabled a new burst of creativity among dance choreographers and film artists. Any serious treatment of creativity in the early years of the 21^st century must consider the full range of human innovation. A complete explanation of creativity must also explain comic strips, animated cartoons, movies, music videos, mathematical theory, experimental laboratory science, the improvised performances of jazz and rock music, and the broad range of performance genres found in the world’s cultures (Sawyer, 2006c).

A focus on European high art forms implicitly privileges a set of values that is culturally and historically specific – at a time when innovation economies are found around the globe. In recent years, scholars in fields such as anthropology and sociology have examined the nature of creative genres in non-Western cultures, and have found that most of these non-Western genres are very different from European high art forms (Becker, 1982; Layton, 1991; Sawyer, 2006c). For example, many non-Western cultures have different conceptions of the individual and of creative activity that lead them to downplay the degree of originality in their works, and to emphasize their continuity with tradition (whereas in Western cultures, creators generally call attention to the originality in their works and emphasize how they break with tradition). A complete explanation of the global shift to an innovation economy requires a profound exploration of the broad range of human creative expression.

The increasing importance of collaborative creativity

Most studies of creativity have been conducted by psychologists. This research tends to focus on cognitive processes during and leading up to the moment of insight (eg Ward, Finke and Smith, 1995). This moment almost always occurs when the individual is alone, in isolation; as the peak experience in creative lives, its salience fascinates us and calls out for study. As a result, many creativity researchers have focused on the moment of creative insight, and attempted to analyze it as a psychological or cognitive process.

However, close studies of how creativity occurs in the real world reveals that the mythical moment of insight is misleading. The innovations that impact our world rarely emerge, fully formed, from a single moment of insight. Rather, they typically involve many small “mini-insights,” perhaps one or more each day; and the primary work of the creator is to bring those serial insights together over time, to result in effective innovation. Here are two typical reports from exceptionally creative individuals:

Literary critic Wayne Booth: “My creative periods tend to be sort of spread out rather than moments of actually clear illumination….generally speaking, it’s a matter of hard work and steady progress rather than moments of total transformation and clarity.” (in Csikszentmihalyi and Sawyer, 1995, p357)

Sculptor Nina Holton: “You have these ideas, and then you work on them. As you work on them, you get new ideas….One makes the other one come out.” (in Csikszentmihalyi and Sawyer, 1995, p353)

This requires conscious expertise on the part of the creator – to structure the work day so that these mini-insights continue to emerge, to implement systems and practices to enable each insight to spark the next, and to enable the aggregation of multiple insights to result in the eventual emergence of a worthwhile idea.

These mini insights are deeply embedded in a broader social process (Csikszentmihalyi and Sawyer, 1995). The periods of hard work which precede and follow the insight are fundamentally social, deeply rooted in the social group of colleagues and in the individual’s internalized understanding of the creative domain itself. The balance of hard work and idle time which emerges from these interviews can also be viewed as a balance between social interaction and individual isolation. As Csikszentmihalyi and Sawyer (1995) wrote, based on an interview study with 60 exceptional creators:

we found that creative individuals had a strong subjective awareness of external social or discipline influences at each creative stage. When asked to describe a moment of creative insight, they typically provided extended narratives that described not just a single moment but a complex, multi-stage process, with frequent discussions of interpersonal contact, strategic or political considerations, and awareness of the paradigm, of what questions were interesting as defined by the discipline …. The moment of creative insight … is surrounded and contextualized within an ongoing experience that is fundamentally social. (p334)

A psychological focus on the individual is contradicted by the empirical record in a second, more important, way: in the great majority of innovations throughout history, the small insights that eventually led to the innovation each were generated by different individuals. This research is consistent with sociological approaches such as the production of culture perspective (Peterson and Anand, 2004), as described by Pratt (2004):

The value of this perspective is that it seeks to present cultural outputs as the result of collective innovation by a number of participants whose participation is various, but linked together by the organization of production. Thus, it directs our attention to the analysis of complex organizational forms, as well as individual positioning within them, that constitute particular cultural forms. Production in this sense is not only suggestive of creative and innovative ideas, but also of the conditions under which these ideas may be mobilized (p118).

Innovations emerge from complex social systems, with constant communication, collaboration, and knowledge sharing, to accomplish the necessary process of enabling ideas to spark later ideas, and to enable a social process whereby the multiple component insights could be brought together appropriately to generate an effective innovation.

Collaboration in social networks accelerates innovation because more individuals can have more ideas. The challenge, of course, is to design effective organizational systems so that ideas build on each other, rather than opposing and canceling each other out; so that ideas accumulate over time to result in the emergence of creativity, rather than deteriorating in a political morass of failed projects.

In today’s economy, the most important forms of creativity – movies, television shows, big science experiments, music videos, compact disks, computer software, video-games – are joint cooperative activities of complex networks of skilled individuals. The creative products that US society, for example, is best known for today – including movies, music videos, and video-games – are all made by organized groups of highly specialized individuals.

In today’s creative society, even creative genres that have traditionally been associated with solitary individuals are reshaping around collaboration. For example, writing seems a uniquely solitary activity; however, much creative writing today is deeply collaborative. The scripts of all movies and television shows are created by teams of writers, each contributing throughout the process (Sawyer, in press). The internet has enabled new forms of collaborative writing. The best known is the wiki: a web page that anyone may modify at any time, such as the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Also well known is the community of bloggers, known as the blogosphere; this likewise represents a collective social phenomenon. Most bloggers provide links to other bloggers who write on the same topic, and frequently reference each other’s postings in their own.

Some writers have begun to form writers’ collaboratives – groups of writers who work together to author a single text, which is then published under the name of the collaborative and not any individual author. Two online writer communities that I turned up with an October 2008 internet search were Protagonize (www.protagonize.com) and StoryMash (www.storymash.com).

Various information technologies, including the internet, have enabled new forms of collaboration such as mash-ups and modding. A “mash-up” is a new combination of two existing products; it can refer to music or video sampling, but more commonly refers to web applications that combine data from more than one source. The Google Maps application supports mash-ups by allowing its mapping data to be used on other sites; for example, the WikiCrimes web site combines this map data with user postings of crime locations (http://www.wikicrimes.com). Mash-up sites often support broad collaboration by allowing all users to contribute; any user of WikiCrimes can mark the location of a crime.

“Modding” occurs when a user of a product modifies the product to better suit his or her needs. Modding is particularly common in strong user communities, where users collaborate to share their new modifications. Many examples of modding are found in extreme sports. As an example of modding, extreme bike jumpers often lift their feet off the pedals while in mid-air. This results in a problem: the bike pedals spin around during this time, making it difficult for the biker to get his feet positioned back on the pedals again at the end of the maneuver. One bike jumper modified the pedals to address this problem by inserting a small circle of foam padding on the pedal axle next to the pedal, thus preventing the pedals from spinning in midair but still allowing the pedals to be used when on the ground (Luthje, Herstatt and von Hippel, 2002). Many examples of modding are also found in software; dedicated video-gamers often reverse-engineer and modify their game’s program. An example is the widespread modding of the LEGO Mindstorms robotic control system (Koerner, 2006).

Theorizing collaboration

To explain the creativity of complex collaborating groups, we need a theoretical framework that allows us to understand how groups of people work together, and how the collective actions of many people result in a final created product. These forms of creative production involve distributed cognition-when each member of the team contributes an essential piece of the solution, and these individual components are all integrated together to form the collective product. Most of today’s important creative products are too large and complex to be generated by a single individual; they require a team or an entire company, with a division of labor and a careful integration of many specialized creative workers.

In the 1980s and 1990s, cognitive science underwent an important shift away from a focus on isolated individuals, toward a situated view of knowledge (Greeno, 2006; Robbins and Aydede, 2008). Cognitive scientists were deeply influenced by several strands of research including the ethno-methodological focus on meaning-making found in studies of situated cognition (eg Suchman, 1987); Hutchins’ (1995) work on collective cognition; and activity theory, practice theory, and sociocultural theory, based in American pragmatism and in the Soviet psychology of Vygotsky (as in works by M. Cole, B. Rogoff, and J. Wertsch). These studies documented many complex activities in which individuals participate as but one component in a distributed socio-technical system. Many of these studies take an anthropological approach to the study of task-focused work teams, and these studies have helped scholars to better understand how individuals and technological artifacts function in complex systems of activity. Such studies include the Lancaster study of air traffic control (Dourish, pp64-68) and collaborative virtual environments like DIVE and MASSIVE (Dourish, pp88-91). These studies demonstrate that social action is embedded, that social order emerges from practice, and that individuals and technological artifacts are unavoidably “embedded in a set of social and cultural practices” (Dourish, 2001, p97).

The concept of situated cognition is closely related to the concepts of embodiment and mutualism (Prinz, 2008). “Embodiment” is the notion that before computers can be truly intelligent they must move out into the world and become “embodied” in moving, acting robotic devices (Clark, 1997). Embodiment is central to Dourish’s (2001) discussion of what he calls tangible computing, a term meant to encompass Norman’s “invisible computing” and Weiser’s “ubiquitous computing.” For Dourish (2001), embodiment “means being grounded in everyday, mundane experience” (p125) and is “the property of our engagement with the world that allows us to make it meaningful” (p126).

“Mutualism” is the position that mind cannot be separated from the physical and biological world (Still and Costall, 1991). Mutualism shares with situated cognition a desire to avoid reductionism to any one explanatory factor – whether the physical brain (contrasted with the mental), or the individual mind (contrasted with the sociotechnical system). Mutualism shares an interest in exploring holistic phenomena that emerge from processes of complexity. As Pickering writes, “mutualism aims for emergence without mystery” – it rejects reductionist explanation of complex systems, but without arguing for any spooky non-material forces (Pickering, n.d.). Thus, the mental cannot be reduced to physical causes. Pickering allies this position with critiques of cognitivism including the embodiment tradition starting with Winograd and Flores (1986) and with connectionism (Bechtel and Abrahamsen, 1991).

Among education researchers, these theoretical approaches have been broadly influential, leading to what I call a sociocultural approach (Sawyer, 2005). Within socioculturalism, I include cultural psychologists, Vygotskian educational theorists, and those studying situated action in learning environments (Cole, 1996; Forman, Minick and Stone 1993; Greeno and Sawyer, 2008; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 1990; Suchman, 1987; Valsiner, 1998; Wertsch, 1998). This is a broad definition, because each of these areas holds to subtly different theoretical positions; but they can be grouped for our purposes because they generally hold to a view that the individual and the social are inseparable; the education researcher cannot meaningfully distinguish between what is internal to the individual and what is external context. As the prominent sociocultural psychologist Barbara Rogoff (1990) has argued, “The child and the social world are mutually involved to an extent that precludes regarding them as independently definable” (p28).

Sociocultural approaches are broadly compatible with two prominent traditions in the study of collaboration and learning: First, researchers working within a Piagetian socio-cognitive framework have emphasized the mediating role played by conflict and controversy (Bearison, Magzamen and Filardo, 1986; Doise and Mugny, 1984; Miller, 1987; Perret-Clermont, 1980); second, researchers working within a Vygotskian framework have emphasized how participants build on each other’s ideas to jointly construct a new understanding that none of the participants had prior to the encounter (Forman, 1992; Forman and Cazden, 1985; Palincsar, 1998).

The learning sciences

Soon after the turn of the century, education researchers began to publish books and reports exploring the implications for formal schools of the transition to the age of innovation (eg Bereiter, 2002; Hargreaves, 2003; Sawyer, 2006b). As this transformation continues in the future, knowledge and learning will become increasingly important. For career success, each individual worker will be expected to know a great deal more, and to continually learn to adapt to a changing technological and competitive environment. However, this knowledge must be of a type that can support creative work. The field that studies how different forms of knowledge align with different forms of learning is called the learning sciences (Sawyer, 2006a). Learning sciences is an interdisciplinary field that studies teaching and learning. The learning sciences has been deeply influenced by the above shifts in cognitive science, away from a focus on individual mental representations and processes, toward distributed cognition, situativity, and embodiment. Learning scientists study learning in a variety of settings – not only the more formal learning of school classrooms, but also the more informal learning that takes place at home, on the job, and among peers. The goal of the learning sciences is to better understand the cognitive and social processes that result in the most effective learning, and to use this knowledge to redesign classrooms and other learning environments so that people learn more deeply and more effectively. The sciences of learning include cognitive science, educational psychology, computer science, anthropology, sociology, information sciences, neurosciences, education, design studies, instructional design, and other fields. In the remainder of this report, I draw on learning sciences findings to identify a set of recommendations for how societies can respond to key trends through 2025 and beyond.

Sawyer (2006d) has argued that schools cannot effectively respond to the shift to a knowledge-based creative economy without first moving beyond widely held assumptions about schooling that include the following:

• Conception of knowledge. Knowledge is a collection of facts and procedures.
• Conception of schooling. The goal of schooling is to transfer facts and procedures into students’ heads.
• Conception of the teacher. The teacher is the individual who possesses these facts and procedures, and whose mission is to transfer them to students.
• Conception of curriculum. Simpler facts and procedures are to be transferred first; later facts and procedures progressively build on top of these simpler ones.
• Conception of assessment. The success of schooling can be determined by administering paper-and-pencil tests that determine how many of these facts and procedures the student has internalized.

Collectively, this set of traditional assumptions has been called, variously, a transmission and acquisition model (Rogoff, 1997), the banking metaphor (Freire, 1989), instructionism (Papert, 1993), and the standard model (OECD, 2008).

The problem is that this standard model was designed for the industrialized economy of the early 20^th century. Although schools based on this model have been effective at transmitting a standard body of facts and procedures to students, they are not able to support students in mastering the kinds of knowledge required for creative work. But the structural configurations of today’s schools make it very hard to create learning environments that result in deeper understanding. One of the central underlying themes of the learning sciences is that students learn deeper knowledge when they engage in activities that are similar to the everyday activities of professionals who work in a discipline. This focus on authentic practice is based on a new conception of the expert knowledge that underlies knowledge work in today’s economy. In the 1980s and 1990s, scientists began to study science itself, and they began to discover that newcomers become members of a discipline by learning how to participate in all of the practices that are central to professional life in that discipline. And increasingly, cutting-edge work in the sciences is done at the boundaries of disciplines; for this reason, students need to learn the underlying models, mechanisms, and practices that apply across many scientific disciplines, rather than learning in the disconnected units that are found in many standard model science classrooms.

I have argued (Sawyer, 2008) that learning environments that prepare learners for the knowledge economy will look very different from this standard model. Key characteristics include the following:

Deeper conceptual understanding. Rather than simple accumulation of facts and skills, learners construct deeper conceptual understanding and the ability to think and problem solve with their knowledge.

Availability of diverse knowledge sources. Learners can acquire knowledge whenever they need it from a variety of sources: books, websites, and experts around the globe.

Collaborative group learning. Students learn together as they work collaboratively on authentic, inquiry-oriented projects.

Assessment for deeper understanding. Tests should evaluate the student’s deeper conceptual understanding, the extent to which their knowledge is integrated, coherent, and contextualized.

I elaborate each of these characteristics in the four following sections.

Deeper conceptual understanding

By the 1980s, cognitive scientists had discovered that children retain material better, and are able to generalize it to a broader range of contexts, when they learn deep knowledge rather than surface knowledge, and when they learn how to use that knowledge in real-world social and practical settings. In the late 1980s, these learning scientists began to argue that standard model schools were not aligned with the knowledge economy.

Studies of knowledge workers show that they almost always apply their expertise in complex social settings, with a wide array of technologically advanced tools along with old-fashioned pencil, paper, chalk, and blackboards. These observations led many cognitive scientists to a situated view of knowledge, as described above, and learning sciences researchers have adopted this situated view (Greeno, 2006). “Situated” means that knowledge is not just a static mental structure inside the learner’s head; instead, knowing is a process that involves the person, the tools and other people in the environment, and the activities in which that knowledge is being applied. This perspective moves beyond a transmission and acquisition conception of learning that is implicit in the standard model; in addition to acquiring content, what happens during learning is that patterns of participation in collaborative activity change over time (Rogoff, 1990).

In the knowledge economy, memorization of facts and procedures is not enough for success. Educated graduates need a deep conceptual understanding of complex concepts, and the ability to work with them to generate new ideas, new theories, new products, and new knowledge – through complex cognitive operations such as conceptual elaboration and conceptual combination. They need to be able to critically evaluate what they read, to be able to express themselves clearly both verbally and in writing, and to be able to understand scientific and mathematical thinking. They need to learn integrated and usable knowledge, rather than the sets of compartmentalized and decontextualized facts emphasized by instructionism. They need to be able to take responsibility for their own continuing, life-long learning. These abilities are important to the economy, to the continued success of participatory democracy, and to living a fulfilling, meaningful life. The standard model of schooling is particularly ill-suited to the education of creative professionals who can develop new knowledge and continually further their own understanding.

Diverse knowledge sources

In the standard model, the teacher is assumed to possess all of the knowledge. In the type of learning suggested by learning sciences research (for example, scaffolded constructivist activities such as inquiry- and project-based learning) students gain expertise from a variety of sources – from the internet, at the library, or through email exchange with a working professional – and the teacher will no longer be the only source of expertise in the classroom. Learners will acquire knowledge from diverse sources; of course, expert support from the teacher can facilitate these learning processes, but the teacher’s involvement will not be one of transmitting knowledge.

Collaboration

In the first part of this report, I emphasized the increasing importance of collaboration, both in creativity and in learning. In addition to this body of research supporting the educational benefits of collaboration, the innovation economy demands graduates who are highly skilled at creating together in groups (Sawyer, 2007). But in standard model schools, there is a belief that a student only knows something when that student can do it on his or her own, without any use of outside resources. There is a mismatch between the standard model and the situated, collaborative knowledge and practice that I described above.

Assessment

David Guile (2003) has explored the implications of the knowledge economy for educational institutions and for the policy debate. He begins with the concept of “credentialism” (Young, 1998), one possible response to the shift to the knowledge economy. Credentialism is the belief that education is about the acquisition of pre-existing knowledge; the goal of educational institutions should be to ensure that “the vast majority of the population achieve qualifications or certified skills and knowledge that relate to their future employment” (Guile, 2003, p92). Learning is conceived of as the acquisition of certified knowledge and skills, and lifelong learning is conceived of as a continuing accumulation of qualifications.

Guile goes on to point out that this conception of knowledge and learning is inadequate – mastering existing knowledge and skills is not sufficient to generate the new knowledge that the innovation economy requires. First, credentialism assumes that knowledge and skills are decontextualized commodities to be acquired; when in fact, in knowledge-intensive workplaces knowledge is situated – embedded in contexts and social practices (Greeno and Sawyer, 2008; Lave and Wenger, 1991). Furthermore, the key need is for workers who are capable of continuing innovation, and the certifications granted by today’s educational institutions provide no measure of that capability (Guile and Fonda, 1999; Young, 1998).

The danger is that policy makers could attempt to address the educational needs of the creative society by providing credentialist solutions. In fact, this has been the primary form of response in the UK and the EU (Guile, 2003), and the United States, with the 2001 passage of the No Child Left Behind legislation, with its core focus on standardized test measures.

As I argue below, the schools of the future will increasingly result in customized learning. Yet today’s assessments require that every student learn the same thing at the same time. The standards movement and the resulting high-stakes testing are increasing standardization, at the same time that learning sciences and technology are making it possible for individual students to have customized learning experiences. Customization combined with diverse knowledge sources enable students to learn different things. Schools will still need to measure learning for accountability purposes, but we don’t yet know how to reconcile accountability with customized learning.

In today’s high-stakes testing environment, learning sciences researchers need to demonstrate that their methods result in better student outcomes (Pellegrino, Chudowsky and Glaser, 2001). Today’s standardized tests assess relatively superficial knowledge and do not assess the deep knowledge required by the knowledge society. Standardized tests, almost by their very nature, evaluate decontextualized and compartmentalized knowledge. For example, mathematics tests do not assess model-based reasoning (Lehrer and Schauble, 2006); science tests do not assess whether pre-existing misconceptions have indeed been left behind (diSessa, 2006; Linn, 2006) nor do they assess problem-solving or inquiry skills (Krajcik and Blumenfeld, 2006). As long as schools are evaluated on how well their students do on such tests, it will be difficult for them to leave the standard model behind.

One of the key issues moving forward is how to design new kinds of assessment that correspond to the deep knowledge required in today’s knowledge society (Carver, 2006; Means, 2006). Several learning sciences researchers are developing new assessments that focus on deeper conceptual understanding.

In classrooms that make day-to-day use of computer software, installed on each student’s own personal computer, there is an interesting new opportunity for assessment-the assessment could be built into the software itself. After all, the learning sciences has found that effective educational software has to closely track the students’ developing knowledge structures to be effective; since that tracking is being done anyway, it would be a rather straightforward extension to make summary versions of it available to teachers. New learning sciences software is exploring how to track deep learning during the learning process, in some cases inferring student learning from such subtle cues as where the learner moves and clicks the mouse-providing an opportunity for assessment during the learning itself, not in a separate multiple-choice quiz (eg Gobert, Buckley and Dede, 2005).

Five factors impacting the future of learning

As the age of innovation unfolds over the coming decades, and societies, organizations, and educational institutions evolve, the following unresolved challenges must be addressed. How these challenges are resolved will in large part determine which future scenario of learning will emerge.

1. Technology

For decades, educational futurists have been claiming that computers will change schools. The first was in the 1950s, when B.F. Skinner claimed that his “teaching machines” made the teacher “out of date” (1954, 1968, p22). Then, Papert’s 1980 book Mindstorms argued that giving every child a computer would allow students to actively construct their own learning, leaving teachers with an uncertain role: “schools as we know them today will have no place in the future” (p9). The rise of the internet in the 1990s resulted in an increasing belief that ICT would soon transform schools. However, despite decades of rapid growth in the capabilities of ICT, and substantial government funding to install computers and high-speed internet connections into schools, there is almost no evidence that ICT has enhanced learning (Cuban, 2001). Furthermore, research suggests that when ICT are introduced to schools, they are embedded into existing standard model practices, rather than used to drive a fundamental transformation of schooling. For example, many textbook publishers today are convinced that within a few years, paper textbooks will be replaced by laptop computers that store all of a student’s textbooks and curriculum materials. But if every student has a laptop that contains the same textbooks as before, nothing fundamental has changed.

So it is important to make a distinction between ICT that sustains the existing standard model, and ICT that transforms the standard model towards a more learning-sciences based learning environment. Learning scientists are exploring technologies that support the authentic, situated, and collaborative essence of creative learning (see Sawyer, 2006a). One example is the increasing use of inexpensive wireless interactive learning devices (WILD), handheld computers that are networked and capable of communicating with each other. WILD include personal digital assistants (PDAs) such as the Palm Pilot, and also, increasingly, mobile phones. The promise of harnessing computing where every student has his or her own computer, and where they are available everyday, anytime, anywhere for equitable, personal, effective, and engaging learning give WILD a greater transformative potential than desktop computers. As of 2006, more than 10% of US schools provided handhelds to students (Pea and Maldonado, 2006). The popularity of handhelds reflects the desire of schools to make computing integral to the curriculum, rather than only occasionally used in labs. As of 2005, 55% percent of U.S. children between the ages of 8 and 18 owned a handheld videogame player (Pea and Maldonado, 2006). Since that report, a new generation of handheld devices has become available that have internet capabilities, such as the Nintendo DS and the iPhone 3G, and similar devices raise the level of internet sophistication even higher. At present, there is almost no educational software available for these platforms, but the potential is enormous. One promising current effort is the European Union’s m-Learning project (www.m-learning.org). The m-Learning project is aimed at young adults, aged 16-24, who are most at risk of social exclusion, and the project’s goal is to develop new products and services that will deliver learning experiences via inexpensive, portable devices that are accessible to almost everyone, primarily, mobile phones.

The potential is that this technology could support a form of technology use that is embedded in the ongoing situated practice of the learning community. The 2004 FutureLab report Literature Review in Mobile Technologies and Learning (Naismith, Lonsdale, Vavoula and Sharples, 2004) emphasizes the alignment between the affordances of WILD and the key principles emerging from learning sciences research. First, WILD enable learners to actively construct their own knowledge, for example through participatory simulations such as the Virus Game (Collella, 2000), where learners play the role of hosts in the spread of a virus, and their WILD keep track of who they meet and how the virus spreads. Second, WILD support situated activities that are embedded in authentic contexts, such as MOBIlearn (Lonsdale et al, 2003), a major European research project that is focused on context-aware delivery of content and services, using location-sensitive technologies such as GPS. Third, WILD support collaborative learning environments, both because the devices are networked, and also because they are small enough to be used while learners are engaged in face-to-face activities. An example is the MCSCL project in Chile (Zurita and Nussbaum, 2004), which is using hand-held computers to encourage face-to-face collaboration.

In addition to the potential classroom applications, WILD also enable anytime, anywhere learning, because students can interact with learning content outside of the classroom. Educational software companies have the opportunity to provide small pieces of educational content that students can access while they are engaged in a different activity: watching television or waiting for the bus.

The addition of GPS capabilities to these devices provides for another potential opportunity: context and location sensitive learning software. Several projects are exploring educational applications that respond to the wearer’s current location, such as tour guides (Abowd et al, 1997) and location-aware language learning applications that adapt the content presented according to users’ location (Ogata and Yano, 2005), and digitally augmented field trips (Rogers et al, 2004; Williams et al, 2005). Handhelds are becoming particularly widespread in informal learning settings such as science centers and other museums.

Because learners are networked together as they use WILD, it is an example of computer support collaborative learning (CSCL), a burgeoning research area with international conferences every alternate year. The acronym MCSCL is sometimes used to refer to Mobile CSCL. These applications are usually internet-based and often rely on desktop computers as well as wireless devices. Even when based on desktop computers, CSCL applications share many of the same benefits: they enable collaborative, authentic learning that extends beyond the boundaries of the classroom.

The key to avoiding the mistakes of past advocates of learning technology is to realize that computers will never attain their full potential if they are merely add-ons to the existing standard model classroom. Appropriate use of information technology requires a fundamental rethinking of the entire learning environment.

2. Customization

The goals of standard model schools were to ensure standardization – all students were to memorize and master the same core curriculum – and this model has been reasonably effective at accomplishing these goals. Standard model schools were structured, scheduled, and regimented in a fashion that was explicitly designed by analogy with the industrial-age factory (Callahan, 1962), and this structural alignment facilitated the ease of transition from school student to factory worker.

In the standard model, everyone learns the same thing at the same time. Many parallel structures and processes of these schools align to enforce standardization. But learning sciences findings suggest that each student learns best when they are placed in a learning environment that is sensitive to their pre-existing cognitive structures; and learning sciences research has shown that different learners enter the classroom with different structures. Learning sciences research suggests that more effective learning will occur if each learner receives a customized learning experience.

Educational software gives us the opportunity to provide a customized learning experience to each student to a degree not possible when one teacher is responsible for six classrooms of 25 students each. Well-designed software could sense each learner’s unique learning style and developmental level, and tailor the presentation of material appropriately (see Koedinger and Corbett, 2006, for an example). Some students could take longer to master a subject, while others would be faster, because the computer can provide information to each student at his or her own pace. And each student could learn each subject at different rates; for example, learning what we think of today as “5^th grade” reading and “3^rd grade” math at the same time. In age-graded classrooms this would be impossible, but in alternative models of schooling there may be no educational need to age-grade classrooms, no need to hold back the more advanced children or to leave behind those who need more help, and no reason for a child to learn all subjects at the same rate.

In many countries, age-graded classrooms also serve to socialize children, providing opportunities to make friends, to form peer groups, and to participate in team sports. Some of these activities may not seem critical to learning, but there is a broad base of research suggesting that peer learning is uniquely effective. If learning and schooling were no longer age-graded, other institutions would have to emerge to provide these opportunities. Finally, if primary and secondary schooling are no longer age graded, then higher education could no longer expect all incoming students to be the same age, and this would result in dramatic transformations of traditional universities.

3. Diffusion of education

Museums and public libraries might play an increasingly larger role in education. They could receive increased funding to support their evolution into learning resource centers, perhaps even receiving an increasingly large portion of government education funding. They could participate in several ways: for example, by developing curriculum and lesson plans and making these available to students anywhere over the internet, and by providing physical learning environments as they redesign their buildings to support schooling. Science centers have already taken the lead in this area, developing inquiry-based curricula and conducting teacher professional development, but art and history museums may soon follow suit.

The boundary between formal schooling and continuing education will increasingly blur. The milestone of a high school diploma could gradually decrease in importance, as the nature of learning in school begins to look more and more like on-the-job apprenticeship and adult distance education. The $100 computer and the inexpensive handheld allow for learning to take place anywhere, anytime; 16 year olds could work their part-time jobs during the day and take their classes at night, just like adults do now. Many types of knowledge are better learned in workplace environments; this kind of learning will be radically transformed by the availability of anywhere, anytime learning, as new employees take their laptops or handhelds on the job with them, with software specially designed to provide apprenticeship support in the workplace. Professional schools could be radically affected; new forms of portable just-in-time learning could increasingly put their campus-based educational models at risk.

The relationship between the institution of school and the rest of society may need to change, as the internet allows learners to interact with adult professionals outside the school walls, and as classroom activities become increasingly authentic and embedded in real-world practice.

The internet enables learning to take place anywhere. For example, as of 2005, 22 US states had established online virtual schools; during the 2003-2004 school year, the Florida Virtual School became the state’s 73^rd school district, and now receives per-student funding from the state just like any other district. In the 2004-2005 school year, 21,000 students enrolled in at least one of its courses (Borja, 2005).

The term “Web 2.0″ is often used to refer to a shift in internet usage to more active forms of participation, where all users contribute content and play the role of both producer and consumer (as opposed to “Web 1.0″ where experts generated content and users were primarily limited to the role of consumer). Web 2.0 includes wikis, blogging, multiplayer online games, and modding and mash-ups. Many education researchers are experimenting with Second Life, an internet-based virtual world where individuals can create on-screen characters called avatars, and then communicate with each other through their keyboards. Many university instructors have created classrooms in Second Life; at the Open University in the United Kingdom, the Schome project (www.schome.ac.uk) has created online learning communities for both teenagers and adults. This has led some to suggest that education might experience a similar shift to Education 2.0 – a world that supports collaborative learning, active participatory learning, and new forms of inquiry: new forms of engaging with knowledge (TLRP, 2008).

However, there are many challenges posed when Web 2.0 technologies are introduced into schools. The TLRP report Education 2.0? (TLRP, 2008) has noted that Web 2.0 challenges traditional notions of authority, authorship, and integrity; this may be welcomed by some, but resisted by others. The structure of the curriculum could change radically, even to an extreme of learners developing their own curricula. The challenge is to find a way to harness the collaborative and participatory power of Web 2.0, while retaining valued curricular goals and guidance of experts and teachers.

4. Organizational learning

The organizations that thrive will be those that successfully master the challenges of organizational learning and knowledge management. Future schools will face these challenges.

Organizational learning refers to the activities, processes, and structures through which individuals “acquire, share, and combine knowledge through experience with one another” (Argote, Gruenfeld and Naquin, 2001, p370). Organizational learning processes can be explicitly designed with the goal of increasing organizational learning, or they can be emergent and informal. Organizational learning is an emergent property of groups, and cannot be equated with the sum of the individual learning that happens in the members of the organization.

Knowledge management refers to the processes and structures that retain and distribute knowledge in an organization. Without knowledge management, organizational learning can only be of limited effectiveness, because organizational learning occurs at the team level (Edmondson, 2002), and therefore large complex organizations need systems in place to disseminate knowledge among teams.

Knowledge management has proven to be a difficult task. Several software vendors offer products that purport to accomplish knowledge management – databases where knowledge workers are to enter important information about their experiences with projects, customers, or challenges, marked with keywords that would allow later retrieval by anyone in the organization. However, almost all companies that have implemented such systems have found them to be of extremely limited value; in most cases, staff rather quickly stops using the system altogether.

Most schools today are structured as highly bureaucratic and top-down organizational forms. Such organizational forms have proven to be the least effective at successful organizational learning and knowledge management. A challenge moving forward is for schools to revise their organizational forms to enable adaptive and agile learning and knowledge management. Teacher professional development communities are one promising attempt in this direction (Fishman and Davis, 2006).

5. Educational professionals

In one vision of the innovation economy, the teacher becomes a creative worker, jointly constructing knowledge with learners in a creative classroom. Teachers are considered to be creative professionals, and are trained and rewarded accordingly. Sawyer (2004) has argued that creative teaching involves disciplined improvisation: the ability to draw on the routines and practices that are acquired through experience, but to modify them improvisationally to respond to each classroom’s needs at the moment. Disciplined improvisation acknowledges the benefits of frameworks; well-designed curricula are necessary to effectively scaffold constructivist learning. To create an improvisational classroom, the teacher must have a high degree of pedagogical content knowledge-to respond creatively to unexpected student queries, a teacher must have a more profound understanding of the material than if the teacher is simply reciting a preplanned lecture or script (Feiman-Nemser and Buchmann, 1986; Shulman, 1987). An unexpected student query often requires the teacher to think quickly and creatively, accessing material that may not have been studied the night before in preparation for this class; and it requires the teacher to quickly and improvisationally be able to translate their own knowledge of the subject into a form that will communicate with that student’s level of knowledge.

There are, however, some who espouse a very different vision: of a scripted, “teacher-proof” classroom such that just about anyone would be capable of serving as a teacher. In this vision, sometimes known as “direct instruction,” education researchers and curriculum experts develop a highly detailed lesson plan for each class session: so detailed that, in some cases, all of the teacher’s utterances are scripted. In schools that have implemented this vision, teachers are reprimanded if they diverge from the official script that appears in their lesson plan. In such classrooms, the only skill required of a teacher is the ability to read the script, speak clearly, and manage the students to maintain a focused classroom.

This vision of the de-skilled teacher aligns with the credentialist, instructionist paradigm that I described earlier, and learning sciences research suggests that such a curriculum is not capable of generating creative graduates. Consequently, this vision also aligns with the possibility that the economy could become radically deskilled.

Even if such a vision comes to pass in the great majority of schools, there are likely to continue to be creative classroom options available to those who can afford it. The risk is of a social order that reproduces itself through these imbalances in the education system: deskilled classrooms for the majority of citizens, which prepare them only for deskilled labor, and creative classrooms for a privileged elite, who have been tapped to move into those few professions that continue to require creativity.

Related to these two competing visions of the teacher is the possibility that the role of “teacher” could devolve into multiple roles. For example, the teaching profession could become multi-tiered, with master teachers developing curriculum in collaboration with software developers and acting as consultants to schools, and learning centers staffed by a variety of independent contractors whose job no longer involves lesson preparation or grading, but instead involves mostly assisting students as they work at the computer or gather data in the field (Stallard and Cocker, 2001).

The challenges to any transformation of the teaching profession are likely to include resistance from teachers’ professional organizations, unless the transformations are handled with great sensitivity and political skill. A second challenge would be faced by institutions of higher education responsible for preparing these educational professionals; they currently are designed to prepare for a single, unified teaching profession. In most countries, teachers are certified by government bodies, and before educational certification could become multi-tiered, complex political and institutional processes would have to take place.

Possible Future Scenarios

In the face of the above variables, factors, and pressures, a society’s response to the age of innovation could move down a range of different paths. I group my comments into the six scenarios that are outlined in the OECD report What Schools for the Future? (OECD, 2001). I believe these still best represent the possible range of futures.

Scenario 1: Robust bureaucratic school systems

Schools continue much as they are today. They are characterized by strong, centralized bureaucracies, with standardization and uniformity emphasized. Despite all of the forces identified above, in Scenario 1 schools as institutions prove to be extremely resistant to radical change. This could result due to a combination of vested interests, powerful stakeholders, and parents who prefer only gradual change in schools. It could also result from the importance of the non-classroom functions of schools: providing a place for two-career parents to place their children during the day, socialization, sorting and selection, and the credentialing function.

Forces that work against Scenario 1 include the growing power of learners and parents as producers and participants in learning (“Education 2.0″), the impact of ICT in disseminating learning outside the classroom walls, and a potential crisis in the teacher workforce (which, if taken to an extreme, results in Scenario 6).

Scenario 2: Extending the market model

Advocates of a politically conservative approach – those who hold that the free market always provides better and more efficient solutions – will continue to argue that education should be privatized. An open market of free competition, they argue, will allow educational innovations to be tried, and the successful ones will thrive and propagate. The current centralized government model, they argue, is incapable of innovation due to standardization and top-down control.

In Scenario 2, the conservative vision comes to pass, perhaps due to increasing dissatisfaction with public schools. Government funding is distributed directly to parents, who then choose from a range of educational offerings. Privately-run, for-profit learning centers might begin to offer a three-hour intensive workday, structured around tutors and individualized educational software, with each student taking home his or her laptop to complete the remainder of the day at home. In the US, one of the largest for-profit educational franchises is Sylvan Learning Centers; these storefront operations could expand dramatically if given access to government funding. Because curriculum and software would be designed centrally, and the software does the grading automatically, these tutors could actually leave their work at the office – unlike today’s teachers, who stay up late every night and spend all weekend preparing lesson plans and grading. For those parents who need an all-day option for their children due to their work schedule, for-profit charter schools could proliferate, each based on a slightly different curriculum or a slightly different software package. Particularly skilled teachers could develop reputations that would allow them to create their own “start-up schools,” taking 10 or 20 students into their home for some or all of the school day – the best of them providing serious competition for today’s elite private schools, and earning as much as other knowledge workers such as lawyers, doctors, and executives.

The history of innovation suggests that frequent experimentation is necessary for innovation to occur. To enhance innovation, educational systems must develop some way to allow frequent variations to be attempted, and some method for selecting and disseminating the best of these innovations. The innovations must be sustainable over time, and they must be scalable to large numbers of schools and districts. The market is one such mechanism for selection and dissemination; if Scenario 3 is rejected, then another such mechanism must be proposed and implemented.

One risk of allowing competition and innovation in the free market is that the education system could fragment, with some schools offering a creative education (possibly for a small elite) and other schools offering credentialist training in specific, narrowly tailored sets of job-specific skills.

Scenario 3: Schools as core social centers

Schools are largely viewed as successful and are widely respected as playing a central function in society. The level of public support for schools increases, as a broad public recognizes that schools perform a necessary public role. Schools are viewed as centers of a community, and as serving not only the function of educating individuals, but also as serving a collective function of community building and social capital formation. Poor areas receive increased funding to accommodate their relatively greater need.

Schools as core social centers not only serve full-time primary and secondary students, but also play a role in adult and continuing education. Schools become less bureaucratic and more diverse. The boundaries marking one school level from the next become more flexible, as learning is increasingly viewed as a lifelong process. There is greater mixing of ages, and increased youth-adult activities.

Schools work increasingly closely with other community institutions (libraries, museums, social service agencies), viewing themselves as one node in a network. The professional role of teacher evolves to collaborate more closely with other sources of community expertise. Thus the local role of schools becomes much more critical; centralization and uniformity at the national level declines in significance.

Scenario 4: Schools as focused learning organizations

As in Scenario 3, schools enjoy high levels of public trust and increased funding, and equity is an important issue, with poorer schools receiving increased funding to address these disadvantages. Schools reform themselves around a knowledge-society agenda, based in the sort of learning sciences research described earlier in this report. Experimentation and innovation are common, curriculum variations are widespread. More specialized classrooms and schools might emerge (focused for example on the arts, foreign languages and affairs, or technology). Schools retain an important credentialing function, although other forms of credentialing may also emerge; new forms of assessment frequently appear.

Schools become true learning organizations, capable of generating and disseminating innovation. Organizational structures become flatter, with a reduction in hierarchical levels as teams of teachers take on leadership responsibilities. Teachers are viewed as knowledgeable professionals and are more motivated and more highly paid. There is an increasing mobility in and out of teaching and other professions. Compared to Scenario 3, teaching remains a distinct profession with a clear identity, but with more frequent mobility and with more connections to other professionals than in Scenarios 1 or 2. Students often work in small groups, in environments that include not only teachers but other knowledge workers. There may be a wide variety in age grading and ability mixes. ICT is widespread, as are network and communication links outside the schools to other knowledge industries and creative industries.

Scenarios 3 and 4 both display similarities to the future envisioned by the New Horizons for Learning team (www.newhorizons.org), as presented for example in (Dickinson, 2000): schools replaced by community learning centers and radically elaborated public libraries-open 18 hours a day-and early childhood parenting centers.

Scenario 5: Learner networks and the network society

Several trends that I have identified above – the diffusion of education, diverse knowledge sources, and customization – if taken to an extreme could result in a scenario in which schools as we know them become obsolete. (The OECD report refers to Scenarios 5 and 6 as “de-schooling” scenarios.) Today’s large public schools were designed in an industrial era and were based on instructionism, an outmoded model of schooling. Roger Schank (1999) and Seymour Papert (1980) have argued that computer technology is so radically transformative that schools as we know them will have to fade away before the full benefits can be realized. It may be impossible to implement alternative models of learning in the institution that today we know of as school. If today’s schools cannot adapt rapidly enough, parents may increasingly abandon schools and seek other alternatives. The flight from schools would begin with the educated classes, and also with various religious and interest groups. Under pressure from parents, politicians may follow this by reducing funding for schools and increasing funding for other options.

If education diffuses radically, schools may no longer be physical locations where everyone goes to learn; learning could take place at home, on the job, or online. Imagine a nation of online home-based activities organized around small neighborhood learning clubs, all connected through high-bandwidth internet software. There would be no textbooks, few lectures, and no curriculum as we know it today. New forms of credentialing, assessment, and competence measures could proliferate. Software, media, and publishing companies could innovate new forms of curriculum and learning delivery that could accelerate Scenario 5. “Teachers” would operate as independent consultants who work from home most of the time, and occasionally meet with ad-hoc groups of students at a learning club. Each meeting would be radically different in nature, depending on the project-based and self-directed learning that those students were engaged in. In fact, each type of learning session might involve a different learning specialist; new types of learning professionals might emerge – for example, staffing telephone or internet helplines for students, or offering home visits for short tutoring sessions.

Variations of Scenario 5 are commonly presented by education futurists; “Education 2.0″ falls in this category. Scenario 5 supports flexibility, extremely customized learning for each individual, and networked and disseminated learning. One risk, however, is that those at the lowest socioeconomic levels could be left behind in this transformation; a few schools might remain to serve these most disadvantaged students. These may or may not be well-funded institutions, depending on the commitment of society to educating even its poorest citizens.

A second challenge is how Scenario 5 could satisfy the non-classroom functions currently performed by schools: for example, providing a safe place for children while parents work during the day, providing socialization opportunities with peers. Scenario 5 could not come to pass unless other institutions emerged, in parallel with the de-schooling process, to take on these functions.

Scenario 6: Teacher exodus-the “meltdown” scenario

As in Scenario 5, schools are unable to respond to these broad societal shifts, due to institutional inertia. Public respect for schools declines, and funding drops, to the point where schools are no longer able to attract qualified teachers. As today’s teachers retire, and the knowledge society demands increasingly high qualifications for teachers, communities may not be willing to increase funding levels as necessary to attract the teachers needed in the knowledge society.

We are likely to see a wide range of responses to the teacher shortage, from innovative to traditional. One response will be to move to a deskilled teaching profession, with scripted and “teacher-proof” curricula. Other responses will include an increasing use of ICT as an alternative to teachers.

If this scenario comes to pass, educational equity will be a key challenge. For example, several futurists have predicted that automatization will accelerate dramatically so that an increasing number of jobs can be automated (Pink, 2005). This trend could combine with increased globalization such that unskilled jobs would almost all relocate to low-wage countries. The effect on advanced economies would be to create a radically tiered social structure, with a few highly paid creative knowledge workers at the top, and the great majority of the workforce having extremely limited job opportunities (apart from service sector jobs, such as waiting on tables or repairing automobiles, that are resistant to automatization and outsourcing).

In such a society, it would become politically difficult to argue that creative abilities were required of all citizens. In a difficult budgetary and funding environment, it might begin to be perceived as inefficient to invest in a learning sciences-based education for the entire workforce if only a small percentage of workers would eventually need those skills. A tiered educational system could then emerge, with a small cadre of creative and highly paid teachers educating the creative workers of the future, and a much larger cadre of relatively unskilled teachers simply executing scripted curricula.

Final challenges

I believe that some combination of Scenarios 3, 4, and 5 represent the best form of schooling for the innovation age. However, there are substantial societal and institutional forces in place that work against any transformation to such a future. To avoid Scenarios 1, 2, or 6, learning sciences researchers will have to develop four broad categories of materials, to work as a unified whole, while allowing for adaptation and customizability:

Textbooks must be rewritten (or even reconceived as laptop-based software packages), to present knowledge in the developmentally appropriate sequence suggested by the learning sciences, and to present knowledge as a coherent, integrated whole, rather than as a disconnected series of decontextualized facts. This poses substantial challenges for private textbook publishers, and for the school leaders who review and approve textbooks.

Curricular units must be prepared that are suitable for teachers to draw on and adapt to the unique needs of each classroom. These could be developed by private publishers, or a form of open-source community of educators could emerge to allow teachers to share and build on their own curricular innovations (several such communities exist online today; see Fishman and Davis, 2006).

Educational software that is based on learning sciences principles must be made commercially available. This poses substantial challenges for the private companies that develop such software. Exciting new learning applications are emerging from university research laboratories, but few of these are being developed into commercial products – in large part, because other aspects of schools, identified in this report, also need to change before such applications can be successfully implemented.

Assessments must be developed that assess deep knowledge instead of surface knowledge, and to take into account the fact that due to customization, different learners might learn different subject matter (Pellegrino, Chudowsky and Glaser, 2001). These new forms of assessment do not yet exist, and a clear vision of how such tests would be constructed has not yet emerged from learning sciences research. A critical issue for the future is to continue this work. Test construction is complex, involving field tests of reliability and validity for example, and will require learning scientists to work with psychometricians and policy experts (Pellegrino, Chudowsky and Glaser, 2001).

In addition to these scholarly challenges, an even bigger challenge to assessment reform is likely to be political. It will not be easy to convince those government bodies responsible for educational assessment to transition to these fundamentally new assessments-in no small part because parents may resist the use of tests that look very different from the ones they experienced in school. A further political difficulty is that during the transition period to learning-sciences based classrooms and deeper forms of assessment, there is likely to be a period of several years during which different children are likely to excel at the new assessments than at the old. Those parents whose children seem to be disadvantaged by lower scores are likely to actively resist the new assessments.

Conclusion

We are entering the innovation age. In the decades ahead, as the nations of the world respond to the demand for innovation, creativity will be increasingly valued. There are no forces at present, and none potentially on the horizon, that would result in a return to an industrial-age economy; no forces that would reduce the importance of creativity to society and the economy.

However, the innovation age could unfold along a broad range of paths. The most humanistic, liberal view is of a world where all people realize their full creative potential through effective educational institutions and work environments, and find fulfillment through creative work and creative leisure activities. However, a more class-based outcome is also possible – a world in which a small creative elite is capable of generating sufficient innovation to grow the economy, with the remainder of the workforce continuing to engage in scripted, process-managed, uncreative work.

Based on my best understanding of innovation research, I believe that this pessimistic outcome is unlikely – because the most innovative companies are those that foster and demand innovation from all of their employees, rather than a small elite. Decades ago, many industrial-age companies had a research and development team that functioned as a creative elite; all new ideas were expected to come from this team, and the rest of the company was simply expected to execute, to follow instructions with almost no creativity required. In recent decades, this model has proven to be ineffective, and the most innovative companies have shifted to organizational designs that foster creativity throughout the organization.

To maximize innovation and knowledge generation, many societal factors must be in alignment. In closing I emphasize two: first, the broader society must foster knowledge communication and dissemination, through enhanced social networks, transportation infrastructures, and communication technologies. Second, learning must be available to all citizens throughout the lifespan, and this learning must be designed to support creative behaviour. At present, many schools (and corporate learning programmes as well) are based in an cultural model of teaching and learning that I have called the “standard model.” I have argued that the standard model does not result in learning that supports creative behaviour. Fortunately, research emerging from the learning sciences is showing how to design learning environments that result in creative learning.

I have identified a range of challenges that must be overcome before schools and other organizations can successfully redesign learning environments on learning sciences principles. For the future of creativity and innovation, it is critical that societies overcome these challenges and build creative classrooms designed for the innovation age.

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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.

Technology has always been at the core of human practices, mediating our engagement with, and involvement within, our social and physical environment and shaping what we know, how we develop and how we use this knowledge. Cole (1998), taking a socio-cultural perspective, explains the mediational essence of technology as follows:

“The environment in which human beings live is an environment transformed by the artefacts of prior generations, extending back to the beginning of the species. The basic function of these artefacts is to coordinate human beings with the physical world and each other; in the aggregate, culture is seen as the species-specific medium of human development.” (1998, p17)

In this sense, the environment of the infant is not a natural habitat but one created by people (Macmurray, 1961). Culture does not only supplement and extend human capacities and skills, but it is seen as a key ingredient of them (Cole, 1998). The mediating function of cultural artefacts in human activity – including technical or material tools as well as psychological ones such as spoken language – has implications for social practices and identity formation. The emergence of new tools is often associated with the redistribution of power and authority, and seen as the key determinant of the relationships between the individual and the community (Nsamenang and Lamb, 1998; Rogoff, Mosier, Mistry and Göncü, 1998; Schieffelin and Ochs, 1998; Super and Harkness, 1998). As Nsamenang and Lamb remark, “both social and technological intelligence are embedded in the ecocultural imperatives that focus and channel individuals to acquire the right moral posture, the appropriate social graces, and the technical skills required for acceptable, functional membership in the culture” (1998, p251).

McLuhan (1964) describes three major technological eras in human history, the periods of oral communication, literacy, and that of electric flow of information. Each of these periods had its characteristic arrangements for human practices, including specific educational technologies for knowledge building. Thus, educational practices and theories mirror and converge with the technological trends that are dominant in a particular cultural-historical period (Wegerif, forthcoming; Sharples, Taylor and Vavoula, 2007). For instance, the establishment of Western education in the first half of the 20th century reflected the goals and needs of the industrial economy (Sawyer, 2006, p41). This led to the emergence of child-focused educational institutions which have been organised around the transmission model of learning (also referred to as factory-style ‘assembly line instruction’ (Rogoff, Paradise, Arauz, Correa-Chavez and Angelillo, 2003).

In turn, each new culture centering around an emergent technological tradition constitutes a social platform for experimentation with new ways of thinking and being (Allan and Lewis, 2006, p844). In the industrial era, such experimentation was focused around ‘producing’ knowledgeable children in a factory model: “Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life” (Cubberley, 1916, p338, in Rogoff et al, 2003, p181). The technological transformation contemporary cultures are witnessing heralds the start of the ‘electronic era’ (Logan, 2004) or ‘the Network Society’ (Castells, 2000), where electronic information networks provide the basis for the organisation of societal structures and activities. The novelty of these networks is that they afford opportunities for social interaction that are temporarily and spatially unbounded. Such networks foster community building and sharing of a virtual kind, and enable the participants to experiment with and develop virtual or ‘alternative identities’ (Cliff, O’Malley and Taylor, 2008 p19).

There has been a growing interest in exploring and predicting the benefits and potential dangers of the current technological advancement. In particular, the implications for education and schooling have been hotly debated. For instance, with regards to the impact of new technology on ‘Generation Y’ (people born between 1978 and 1993, followed by the ‘Google Generation’, born after 1994) Weiler describes the moral panic as follows:

“Much commentary has been circulating in academe regarding the research skills, or lack thereof, in members of “Generation Y”… The students currently on college campuses, as well as those due to arrive in the next few years, have grown up in front of electronic screens: television, movies, video games, computer monitors. It has been said that student critical thinking and other cognitive skills (as well as their physical well-being) are suffering because of the large proportion of time spent in sedentary pastimes, passively absorbing words and images, rather than in reading.” (2004, p46)

But are these current changes truly that detrimental? Or rather, are we encountering (and resisting) yet another technological juncture, a major technologically-induced transformation in thinking, learning and knowing? If so, our most crucial challenge is to understand how new technology restructures (augments, enhances or constrains) our thinking capacity and performance. Responding to this challenge, this paper looks at the recent technological impact on our cognitive capacities and intellectual endeavours.

Habits of mind

The accelerating rate of IQ increase in most developed countries in the last century has baffled social scientists for decades. Psychometric reports indicate that the mean IQ of school children a hundred years ago would have been just under 70 (Flynn, 2009), at the lower end of today’s IQ scores. Jim Flynn points out that the gains over time are so incredible that one could be driven to the rather absurd conclusion that most of our ancestors from the early 20th century were mentally retarded (Flynn, 2009). Flynn uses the concept of ‘habits of mind’ to offer a more attractive explanation. He argues that the average person today is more habituated to the kind of abstract, hypothetical logic valued in IQ tests (eg the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, WISC), and so they will gain better test scores than their grandparents. In turn, he associates this relatively recent cognitive habituation with the shift from pre-scientific to post-scientific operational thinking (a cultural tool or technology in itself), describing this process as the result of ‘reciprocal causality’: “if an activity causes a rise in a cognitive skill, then that enhanced cognitive skill must be a pre-requisite for performing that activity” (2009, p86).

Cognitive habituation is not simply a historical issue, but a cultural one. For example, the habituation of the average individual to abstract logic and hypothetical problem solving is prevalent in Western, literacy-based cultures, but uncommon in communities unexposed to post-scientific operational thinking. The following brief episode from Luria’s interview-based studies among peasants in the Soviet Union illustrates Flynn’s point (Luria, 1976, cited in Flynn, 2009, p80).

White bears and Novaya Zemlya (pp108-109)

Q: All bears are white where there is always snow; in Novaya Zemlya there is always snow; what colour are the bears there?

A: I have seen only black bears and I do not talk of what I have not seen.

Q: But what do my words imply?

A: If a person has not been there he cannot say anything on the basis of words. If a man was 60 or 80 and had seen a white bear there and told me about it, he could be believed.

The dialogue reveals a startling discrepancy between the abstract reasoning and pure logic emphasised by the researcher and the mindset of the research participant, who insists on the importance of experience in making assumptions and decisions about the world. As Flynn comments on the pre-scientific mindset of our ancestors and non-Western cultures, “Their minds were simply not permeated by scientific language and they were not in the habit of reasoning beyond the concrete” (2009, p82).

It is easy to see the link between such variations in cognitive habituation and our use of technology, which makes Flynn’s position an extremely useful starting point. The observed IQ gains imply technologically induced changes in our ways of thinking, being and positioning ourselves in our world. If, as he puts it, these changes signify a ‘liberation of the human mind’ (2009 p82), then it is a priority for social research to investigate the potentials and possibilities brought forward by more current technological advancements. This paper adopts ‘habits of mind’ as an overarching concept and explores the changing cognitive demands associated with new technology, with special focus on the internet, computer/video games and television.

2. Thinking, learning and technology

Different theoretical frameworks conceptualise learning in various ways, with significant variations in terms of the role assigned to the learner and the teacher, the relevance attributed to the context, and the description of processes and outcomes of learning. Similarly, there are differences in the assumptions about how technology shapes human cognition and action.

Traditional cognitive psychology restricts the study of human thinking to mental processes that occur within the individual. This approach is encapsulated by the information processing perspective, where the mind is conceptualised as an information processing device with symbol systems and mental structures that change and transform as a result of perceiving, interpreting and incorporating new information. In recent decades an alternative perspective has been gaining ground, defined by some as the situativity perspective, where the focus is “on interactive systems of activity of which the individual is only one part” (Derry and Steinkuhler, 2003, p803).

Contemporary situativity approaches can all be linked to Lev Vygotsky’s theoretical framework, which emphasises the mediating role of the social and cultural context in human practices. They encompass, among others, situated cognition (Lave, 1988), socio-cultural theory (Wertsch, 1998), activity theory (Nardi, 1996), embodiment theory (Glenberg, 1997) and distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1995). Most importantly, theories linked to this perspective refute the idea that the mind of an individual can be studied in isolation, extracted from the surrounding environment. Gee (2008) documents the consequent emergence of new descriptors for thinking, such as ‘embodied’ (Clark, 1997), affective (Damasio, 1999, 2003), technological (Hutching, 1995, Latour, 1999) interactive (Greeno, 1998; Lave and Wenger, 1991) and sociocultural (Gee, 1992) (all cited in Gee, 2008).

Learning therefore is seen as “the acquisition of many specialised abilities for thinking” (Vygotsky, 1978, p.83), or growing expertise in the use of available and valued cultural tools (Säljö, 1999). Motivation for learning is inextricably linked to membership, expert status and full participation in the relevant ‘communities of practice’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991). It is worth reflecting on the epistemology of practice, as it largely determines what issues are seen as important, and structures the way in which those issues are addressed and resolved. Thus our epistemology of practice basically shapes (and is shaped by) our cultural context, developing into an epistemic frame or the ‘grammar’ of the culture (Shaffer, Squire, Halverson and Gee 2005, p107). Technology of any sort has the capacity to both expand as well as constrain the repertoire of cognitive competencies (Rogoff, 2003). Equally, technology is transformed via the process of appropriation by its users who ‘make it their own’: “the cultural tool both lends itself to being used in various kinds of ways and at the same time imposes various kinds of constraints” (Light and Littleton, 1999, p11). The concepts of co-evolution or reciprocal causality are therefore especially useful when examining the relationship between learning, thinking and new technology (Bruckman, 2004).

What is so special about new technology?

In order to address this question, we need to turn to Logan’s (2008) conceptualisation of new technology, or ‘new media’. He reminds us that any technology can be regarded as ‘new’ in any given situation, as long as it is “new to the context under discussion” (Logan, 2008, p5). In our contemporary contexts, the term ‘new media’ is typically used to denote forms of digital media that are interactive in nature, afford two-way communication and build on a certain level of computing (Logan, 2008). Buckingham (2007a) lists the internet, mobile phones, computer games, and interactive television as forms of digital media. Other commentators link new media to the notion of convergence (Jenkins, 2006a), ie the possibility of combining different technologies, applications or modes of communication such as text, audio, digital video, mobile devices, the Web and so on; remediation (eg Bolter and Grusin, 1999) ie old and new media mutually refashioning each other; interactivity which is interaction between users and between user and technology. These concepts remind us of McLuhan’s crucial point regarding the relationship between old and new technology: “A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them” (1964, p278).

In what follows, this paper explores four core themes related to the issue of technology-mediated changes in cognitive habituation: i) exercising the mind; ii) information behaviour, iii) connectivity and symbolic social networks; and iv) merging roles.

3. Changing habits of mind

3.1 ‘Exercising the mind’ (Johnson, 2005)

In a recent article, Nicholas Carr talks about the web ‘rewiring’ the ‘neural circuitry’ of regular internet users, such as bloggers. He reflects on his personal experiences as follows:

“I am not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I am reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy… deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle… Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet-ski.” (2008, p2)

His reflections mirror popular, widely publicised sentiments about the way new technology (such as electronic or video games and television) ’stupefies’ the consumers of contemporary culture, creating new generations of virtual non-readers “for whom maturity is a process of mental atrophy” (Andrew Solomon, cited in Johnson, 2005, p18). Embedded in this negative view is the conceptualisation of reading as fundamental in developing cognitive skills associated with attention, concentration, sustained effort or the use of imagination. In contrast, the use of popular electronic media is not seen as a form of mental exercise, and is often deemed as educationally worthless or even detrimental.

So how does new technology affect our habits of mind through the mental exercise it promotes? Let us look at representation first. Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006) argue that modes of representation, for example textual or visual modality, vary across culture and time. A significant impact of new technology – intensified by the blending of the internet and digital media – is that textual representation has lost its long-lasting dominance: “most texts now involve a complex interplay of written text, images and other graphic or sound elements, designed as coherent (often at the first level visual rather than verbal) entities by means of layout” (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006, p17). The richness of representation that we are exposed to in contemporary contexts is in sharp contrast with the singular modality of traditional textual (or print-based) media.

It is quite likely that such complexity puts new cognitive demands on the individual, requiring swift switches between segments of information presented in different modalities. Also, according the CIBER (Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research) team at UCL (University College London), new technology may enhance the parallel processing skills of young users (CIBER, 2008, p18). On the other hand, the mind habituated to the swift processing of multimodal representation may find it hard to re-adjust to traditional fully text-based representation. Oblinger (2008) notes that students regard the primarily textual communication characteristic of educational institutions as ‘flat’ and prefer to be engaged in more sensory-rich activities. Also, Buckingham (2007b) contends that children find it easier to understand audio-visual media content than verbal (printed or textual) content.

A related issue is multi-tasking. That the younger generations are capable of multi-tasking is highlighted in the academic literature. As a young Net Generation user admits: “I’m usually juggling five things at once” (Windham, 2007, in Oblinger, 2008, p11). However, this may not be a general life-style trend; the CIBER team (CIBER, 2008) report no decisive evidence that younger generations multi-task in every area of their lives. Nevertheless, it is obvious that our minds are now habituated to a different kind of exercise regime which draws on specific features of new technology. We are challenged by, and we respond to, the interactivity, multimodality and sensory richness of our contemporary information landscape.

A similar argument can be made when looking at the changing pace of television programmes and films. Bordwell (2002) notes that, over the last 40 years, Hollywood films have become much faster, from 300 to 700 shots per film in the 1930-60s to 3000-4000-shot movies by the century’s end. (The average shot length has shortened from 8-11 seconds per shot to 3-8 seconds, with some films even going below 3 seconds per average shot, eg The Crow, Sleepy Hollow, El Mariachi, Dark City or Armageddon.) Even when the frames are kept longer in contemporary cinema, the camera stays in motion, contributing to the fast pace of the imagery. Although the speed does not typically reduce the coherence of the plot, “the style aims to generate a keen moment-by-moment anticipation… look away and you might miss a key point” (Bordwell, 2002, p24).

This trend is explored further by Johnson (2005). He points out that, contrary to the popular opinion that mass media ‘dumb consumers down’, contemporary television culture is actually getting more and more cognitively challenging. In addition to the changing pace, he also notes multiple threading, with as many as 10 parallel threads in a plotline (for example, the lives and adventures of 21 characters are intertwined in an episode of the TV series 24). Furthermore, different threads may actually be layered on the top of each other in one single scene (eg in Sopranos). Multi-threading has been a popular feature of TV soap operas for decades. What is unique in the contemporary trend is the combination of parallel threading with subtle narration that covers serious themes and topics and offers little or no ‘hand-holding’.

According to Johnson, the narrative complexity requires a level of intellectual labour unseen in early television. So the intellectual work that once happened on-screen now happens off-screen: instead of being led through the narrative by carefully positioned signposts that draw attention to significant details (‘flashing arrows’, as Johnson puts it), the viewer is challenged to do all the analytic work and make sense of the plot with limited support. The cognitive complexity of popular TV programmes (eg Lost) has led to the creation of online forums and blogging communities (eg abclost.blogspot.com, a blogging site for Lost).

Partially, such increase in mental stimulation may be the consequence of what the average person is habituated to today (eg through exposure to computer or video games). Therefore, the average viewer can handle such cognitive complexity and, using the concept of reciprocal causality, has become habituated to this sort of multi-layer, circumspect approach to thinking and problem solving.

Finally, let us look at the issue of exercising the mind in the context of gaming. Computer and video games are often blamed for the reduced attention span in younger generations, who are probably the most enthusiastic and regular gamers. (In his review for CIBER, Barrie Gunter (2008) reports that 50% of the 5-15 year olds in the UK play computer or video games on a daily basis.) Linked to this assumption is the claim that younger generations are used to and need to be entertained otherwise they lose interest quickly (eg Kipniss and Childs, 2005; Hay, 2000, both cited in Williams and Rowlands, 2008). This claim is refuted in the CIBER report (CIBER, 2008) which, based on extensive review of research, found no conclusive supporting evidence. Similarly, one could argue that the real impact of games on cognitive capacities is masked by our focus on the changing performance and attitudes of the younger generations in formal educational contexts.

Contrary to popular belief, gaming does not necessarily provide instant gratification and quick entertainment. Computer games require attention, motivation and perseverance for long stretches of time, quite often coupled with extensively delayed rewards (Johnson, 2005). Consequently, the problems reported in formal educational contexts are less likely to be due to the reduced ability among students to keep focused and work hard on a task. They are more likely to be explained by the way in which learning opportunities are organised in formal school contexts to structure and facilitate particular ways of thinking and participation.

In the context of video or online gaming, new technology opens up spaces for new cognitive strategies uncharacteristic of formal school settings, which Johnson describes as ‘probing and telescoping’. These new ‘habits of mind’ are stimulated by the unpredictable, continuously evolving, hugely interactive and ‘collateral’ learning experience found in gaming culture (Johnson, 2005). Furthermore, as Johnson warns us, popular culture is not suited well to exercise our minds in the traditional sense, “to follow a sustained textual argument or narrative that doesn’t involve genuine interactivity” (2005, p187). Thus, regardless of how advanced young gamers may be in meeting the complex cognitive challenges in informal gaming contexts, their skills will not equip them for the intellectual work required at school. Equally, interactivity and participatory approaches are not typically encouraged in education, which may also explain the problems young generations encounter when engaging in intellectual activities in formal learning contexts. Buckingham sees this as the ‘new digital divide’ (2007a), a growing gap between the young generations’ experiences with new technology outside the classroom, and their school based experiences (including those involving new technology).

Even though media education and information technology (or ICT) are becoming well-established in the UK and elsewhere (see Erstad, Gilje and de Lange, 2007, for an interesting account of the Norwegian context), young people often find the use of technology at school “boring, frustrating and irrelevant in their lives” (Buckingham, 2007a, p112). Similarly, in his report on an attempt to incorporate games in A-level Media Studies, McDougall (2007) describes both students’ and teachers’ difficulties with bridging the gap between informal gaming for pleasure, and gaming as a school-based activity with specific assessment outcomes. As a student reflects on their bafflement: “Conventionally, education is not something you do for fun as a child” (McDougall, 2007, p129).

Note, however, that from the point of view of interactivity and participation, the critique of our education system is not particularly new. For example, Rogoff and colleagues (Rogoff et al, 2003) carried out intensive research on the cultural-historical dimensions of how learning and teaching is structured in different societies. Their research identified the major limitations of the Western-style assembly-line instruction model, when compared to the intent-participation model prevalent in non-Western cultures (eg indigenous Mexican communities). Rogoff and colleagues maintain that the main problem with formal education as we know it is that it segregates the child from the ongoing cultural activities and social practices of the adult world. Consequently, formal educational practices remove the intrinsic motivation to learn that is inherent in the participatory framework of intent-participation settings. Importantly for this paper, new technology removes some of the barriers to participation and interaction which have been associated with the educational model of the industrial era. It helps us return to a more participatory and more interactive framework. However, we also need to emphasise that the participatory and interactive frame afforded by new technology is largely virtual and symbolic in nature, in contrast to the intent-participation cultures examined and documented in Rogoff and colleagues’ work (2003).

To conclude, there is clear indication that new technology changes our ways of ‘exercising the mind.’ The real issue is not whether new technology leads to quantitative changes (eg decreasing or increasing our attention span), but how exactly it resources and channels human thinking, establishing new, qualitatively different exercise regimes for the mind. The emergence of new technologies seems to have fostered and stimulated new styles of learning and thinking of increasing complexity, with a clear emphasis on interactivity and participation.

One possible reason why the positive aspects of this cognitive re-habituation are not more widely recognised is that most of the activities associated with new technology are leisure-based. As Riley (2008) points out, youth culture is often seen as pleasure-centred. The leisure activities afforded by new technology can thus easily be interpreted as new forms of pleasure-seeking, with the amount of time spent on games, internet or television indicative of intoxication. The concept of ‘habits of mind’ gives us an alternative angle, one which recognises the source of motivation for contemporary leisure activities in the cognitive challenges they pose, and in the satisfaction gained from skill mastery. Thus, as consumers of leisure media, we are habituated to novel, complex forms of intellectual engagement. Such “enhanced problem solving in visual and symbolic contexts… is necessary if we are to fully enjoy our leisure” (Flynn, 2009, p86). If this is so, our leisure orientation has changed and, in turn, it has transformed our thinking. This cognitive shift has a clear impact on what sort of intellectual challenges we seek, both in leisure-based activities and in non-leisure learning situations.

3.2 Information seeking behaviour

The second theme, interlinking with the previous one, concerns the ways in which new technology has impacted on our information seeking behaviour. Contributing to the extensive CIBER project (CIBER, 2008), Williams and Rowlands’s (2008) review concludes that, in recent decades, the internet has become a crucial medium for education, recreation and communication. Most importantly for this section, the internet has become the main source of information for students either for personal, academic or professional purposes. Commentators also note the increasing discrepancy between information seeking in printed texts versus internet based, digital information seeking. The CIBER team’s report (CIBER, 2008) lists the following key features of digital information seeking behaviour:

• ‘horizontal information seeking’ (skimming, reading 1-2 pages of an online source then ‘bouncing back’, and often never returning)
• navigation (extended time spent on finding one’s way around)
• ‘power browsing’ (relatively little time spent on each site)
• ’squirreling behaviour’ (’squirreling away’ material by downloading it)
• checking the reliability of information by quick ‘cross-checking across different sites’ (p10)

But how is this new information behaviour facilitated and resourced by the internet? To address this question, we need to return to the issue of representation. Linked to the visual/textual divide is the topic of linearity and the availability of paths for comprehension.

“In densely printed pages of text, reading is linear and strictly coded. Such texts must be read the way they are designed to be read – from left to right and from top to bottom, line by line. Any other form of reading (skipping, looking at the last page to see how the plot will be resolved or what the conclusion will be) is a form of cheating and produces a slight sense of guilt in the reader.” (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006 p204)

In contrast, partially due to the multimodality of the internet, reading paths on a web page may be circular, diagonal, spiralling and so on. According to Kress and Van Leeuwen, reading paths shape and contribute to the meaning. In essence, we are faced with two modes of reading, or ‘two regimes of control over meaning’. Linearity means that the order and connection between the elements is set, therefore the meaning does not have to be conveyed in the individual elements (Kress and Van Leeuwen explain this as a ’syntagmatics’ imposed on the reader). On the other hand, non-linearity requires a ‘paradigmatics’: elements are selected and presented according to some sort of a paradigmatic logic, but the reader has the freedom to put these elements in order and link them together:

“In the design of such texts there will be pressure to put more of the meaning in the individual elements of the composition, to use more highly coded images – symbolic and conceptual images, tightly written, self-contained items of information, stereotyped characters, drawings or highly structured images rather than realistic photographs, and so on.” (2006, p208)

In addition to the features of multi-modality and non-linearity, another crucial characteristic of websites is that they offer various reading paths. Although there might be some sort of a hierarchy embedded in the design of a webpage, whereby the reader can identify the most salient elements and navigate in between them using the ’suggested’ route, these reading paths are not prescribed or mandatory. Yet, the multiple pathways that websites offer are not random either, but created as ‘plausible’ reading paths. Alternative reading paths mean that the reader can decide how to traverse in the textual space. In this sense, they are more ‘interactive’ than print-based texts. The viewers who ‘power browse’, skim read and hop from site to site make use of these salient representational features of the web (which can also be seen in billboards, newspapers or advertisements).

The image of users traversing through “the crazy quilt of the internet media” (Carr, 2008, p3) brings us back to the dominantly interactive and participatory nature of cognitive practices facilitated by new technology. Internet, or new technology in general, is not simply a new resource for the same activities (in this case, information seeking), it fundamentally changes the activities it is used for. But how can we explain the necessity – or the value – of such changes in predominance from linearity to non-linearity, from textual to multimodal representation, from a single, mandatory comprehension path to a range of possible reading paths? And what are the benefits of these changes in terms of our cognitive capacities of information processing?

In his recent account of information foraging theory, Pirolli (2007) describes such changes as a process of cognitive adaptation, necessitated by the human informavore’s (Miller, 1983, in Pirolli, 2007) propensity for information foraging. From an evolutionary perspective, technological turning points help create more efficient ways to manage our increasingly rich ‘information environment’ in a co-evolutionary fashion: our epistemic drives and strategies (or technologies) co-evolving with the environment. One can see each revolutionary turning point in human technology (eg the shift from orality to literacy, the introduction of printing press, the appearance of electric devices or that of electronic and digital media) as enhancing the process of gathering, using and producing relevant information or knowledge. Our amplified information-foraging efficiency equips us with knowledge and skills to deal with the growing complexity and richness of our information environment. At the same time, the technology developed for our enhanced efficiency contributes to the further increase in the complexity of the information environment we have created. So for example, the abundance of information that we need to wade through and consolidate on the internet causes what Pirolli refers to as ‘poverty of attention’ (2007, p13) thus requiring new, more efficient ways of information search and management.

Inevitably, our increased efficiency has potentially negative repercussions. These can be explained by the shifts in cognitive habituation, with changing attitudes towards traditional technologies such as reading. Carr (2008) suggests that heavy internet users (eg bloggers) may give up on reading books altogether. Johnson (2005) too, talks about “the death of the typographic universe” (Johnson, 2005, p185), often attributed to the dominance of popular culture. Consequently, as Leon Watts (2008, personal communication) contends, we are “habituated to marshalling and consolidating volumes of information at the expense of reflection on the rhetorical integrity of an individual force”. Interestingly, we can see this trend filter into forms of traditional media; Carr (2008) notes that the New York Times now dedicates its second and third page to article abstracts, for the ‘hurried reader’.

But will we ever stop reading? Will the kind of intelligence associated with deep, sustained reading truly disappear, only to be found in the remaining havens of formal educational institutions? And if so, is this a problem? Maryanne Wolf (2007) argues that reading is not an instinctive skill which therefore needs to be consciously practiced. If so, contemporary users of new technology may not develop a routine for regular reading practice. Furthermore, Wolf notes that sustained, undisturbed deep reading creates a platform for ‘deep thinking’: contemplation, the formation of associations or inferences, and imagination. Following this argument, one could conclude that the jet-ski type of reading characteristic of internet users is detrimental to our intellectual development in traditionally valued directions.

Yet other commentators are more positive. Williams and Rowlands (2008) note that the extent of reading in the UK has not reduced in recent decades. On the contrary, we seem to read more today than a couple of decades ago: with regards to book reading, the documented increase is four minutes per day (from an average of three minutes per day in 1975 to an average of seven minutes in 2000), with a similar increase in reading newspapers and magazines. Williams and Rowlands (2008) also cite a recent study by Synovate (Synovate 2007) revealing that 49% of young people read regularly; and a report by Clarke and Foster (2005) on the positive attitude of UK-based primary and secondary school pupils towards reading. In line with these findings, Jenkins (2006c, p19) argues that new forms of literacy do not replace textual literacy. Nevertheless, they argue that traditional literacies must respond to the media change, to ensure that traditional literacy skills are maintained and harnessed in the technological expansion of human skills and capacities.

In terms of the negative aspects, we also need to emphasise the technology-induced changes in our information environment. Buckingham (2007a, p113) reminds us of the “mass of confusing, contradictory and often unreliable information found in new media such as the Web”. Recent studies challenge the popular assumption that younger generations – the ‘cyberkids’ and ‘digital natives’ of the Google generation – somehow have the inherent capacity and technological expertise to master the complexities of the new information landscape. Being ‘techno savvy’ may help with technical issues (eg how to navigate on the internet), but it does not turn someone into a search expert with ‘information fluency’ (Oblinger, 2008). For instance, the CIBER team’s report (2008) indicates no improvement (or deterioration) in young people’s information skills, and concludes that “digital literacies and information literacies do not go hand in hand” (p20). Similarly, Jenkins (2006c, p15) talks about the ‘transparency problem’ both in terms of internet use and computer gaming. They mention Howard Gardner’s work on young users’ evaluation of websites indicating that in their decisions on the credibility of information, format and design weighed more than actual content. Jenkins also highlights that gamers may be good at reflecting critically on the format and the design of the game, but not on the impact of the game on their own thinking and being: how the whole game-world may structure their ‘perception of reality’. Thus, users – regardless of their technical expertise – need guidance and support in developing new media literacy skills or ‘information fluency’ (Oblinger, 2008). In other words, new media users need to become critical consumers and understand

“the ways media representations structure our perceptions of the world; the economic and cultural contexts within which mass media is produced and circulated; the motives and goals that shape the media they consume; and alternative practices that operate outside the commercial mainstream” (Jenkins, 2006c, p20).

This section outlined the links between changing patterns in information seeking and the unique features of our contemporary information environment. Once again, we saw how technological transformations necessitate changes in our habits of mind, specifically, how they structure, channel and constrain the ways in which we access, process and use information. The next two sections will focus on the technological restructuring of social practices.

3.3 Virtual forms of collective experience

Games: isolation or simulated experience?

New media are often blamed for the physical and social isolation of the younger generations. For instance, the largely sedentary activity of video or online gaming is often seen as responsible for the hyperactivity and listlessness observed among many youngsters (Jenkins, 2006b). We need to problematise this popular belief, and recognise the role of earlier technological changes (eg those linked to transport) in the reduction of children’s mobility and space. In this sense, new media can be seen as preserving or recreating what is lost through the world of virtual free play.

Children’s loss of independent mobility, their removal from the outdoor environment and consequent domestic confinement has been the subject of growing body of research (Freeman, 2006). Piaget and colleagues once wrote that “At nine or ten, a child is free as a man and can roam at will all over the town” (Piaget, Inhelder and Szeminska, 1960, pp23-24). Today’s children do not have such independent mobility. The development of new transport systems (especially private vehicles) as well as the redesigning of the urban landscape (with the centralisation of facilities in leisure complexes and shopping centres) has led to the disconnection between where children live and where daily activities (school, leisure, shopping etc) take place. Thus, children are now dependent on their parents and other familiar adults to transport them around from one activity setting to another. Linked to this, parents have grown increasingly concerned about their children’s safety; in Valentine’s report (1996, in Freeman, 2006) 34% of interviewed parents with children aged 8-11 saw cars as the most potentially dangerous aspect of children’s environment. Furthermore, the removal of children from their local communities has led to another trend in children’s socialisation which commentators refer to as ’stranger danger’: the growing weariness of parents of the potential threat posed by strangers in the public arena.

It is clear that, by removing children from their local neighbourhood, we deprive them from the learning experiences these places offer. For instance, independent mobility in the child’s local environment is often associated with increased spatial awareness, autonomy and independent decision making (Freeman, 2006). Also, free, unstructured play is widely regarded as essential in the Western child’s social, emotional as well as cognitive development. Although television has the ability to bring the world to the child, passive ’spectatorship’ cannot substitute for active explorations in one’s immediate or extended environment (Jenkins, 2006b).

Interestingly, digital media – and especially the convergent forms of new media – may afford very similar developmental opportunities to the ones linked to independent mobility in physical space. Work by Shaffer and colleagues (2005) indicates that games bridge the gap between thought and action (or between abstract ideas and real problems), once separated by the predominance of (and our habituation to) post-scientific operational thinking. The bridge that online or computer games create can lead to the emergence of a new habit of mind, one where thought and practice are re-connected through our adventures in a simulated world. Jenkins has a similar argument regarding the value of virtual experiences, describing computer games as contexts which recreate the free, open play children in contemporary Western societies no longer have access to. In our explorations of changing thinking styles and cognitive practices, it is also worth considering Charles Crook’s (1999) argument about cultural tools ‘remediating exploratory activity systems’. In sum, due to its fundamentally interactive and participatory nature, new technology provides a platform for the free exploration of a virtual landscape and participation in shared activities in virtual space. The next sections will elaborate on the process of virtual participation.

Virtual communities and cyber-cooperation

Let us start with the social practices linked to gaming. As noted in earlier sections, interest in computer or video games means that the individual will be drawn to (and stimulated by) the kind of cognitive challenges and reward structure these games present, and will develop the cognitive skills that are needed to meet such challenges. However, the development of expert gaming knowledge is an essentially social process, motivated by the values, goals and practices of a community of gamers (these values include: risk taking, entrepreneurship and expertise). Motivation for learning is inherent in the desire to become an expert gamer. Gamers are not autonomous problem solvers, but engaged in ’social collectivity’ (Logan, 2008) in virtual space.

Jenkins refers to these new contexts for social participation (not restricted to gaming communities but also encompassing different types of online social networks) as ‘participatory cultures,’ “with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices” (Jenkins, 2006c, p3). Gee (2004) uses the term ‘affinity spaces’ to describe informal learning contexts structured around the use of new media. He contends that these offer ‘powerful learning opportunities’ by generating shared practices that i) bridge the gap between participants of different age, class, gender, education etc, ii) bring along more democratic or symmetrical forms of teaching and learning between experts and novices, and iii) blur the distinction between the role of the teacher and the student.

There are obvious links between these conceptualisations of virtual participation and the non-Western ‘intent participation’ models documented by Rogoff and colleagues. Cover (2004, p174) defines participation as a ’strongly held and culturally based desire’ which was basically undermined and negated in the previous technological era. Thus, one could argue that new technology may recreate the structure for ‘learning through participation’ in the form of cyber participation. As Cover (2004, p188) reflects on electronic gaming: “Interactivity… evidences the possibility of democracy as a cultural demand, drive or desire that appears through unexpected, multifarious and diverse sites in different ways, at different times.”

For instance, the convergence of internet and gaming has led to novel forms of online gaming, such as alternative reality games (ARGs), with a very strong participatory orientation. Although some ARGs are commissioned for marketing purposes (commercial ARGs), most of them are developed by independent individuals and groups for education, training or leisure (Dena, 2008). Massively Multiplayer Games (MMORPGs) are online social virtual games seen as the entertainment forms of ARGs (Dena, 2008). ARG players from different parts of the world collaborate over a long period of time “to uncover clues and plot points, solve puzzles, create content, converse with and rescue characters” (Dena, 2008, p42). These games can involve millions of people (the commissioned ARGs Beast or I Love Bees had three million players each), who join the game at different entry points and take on different roles, including going on mission, solving problems through talking, or remaining causal participants who track the experience. We are just beginning to explore the social and educational benefits and implications of alternative reality games (de Freitas and Griffiths, 2007; Dena, 2008). For instance, Schaffer and colleagues discuss the affordances of ‘epistemic games’, which build on virtual collaboration and simulated experience to create educationally valuable contexts for social activity (eg Madison 2200, an epistemic game based on the practices of urban planning, where virtual community activities may have real-life consequences).

Connectedness, symbolic networks and television

Also related to the issue of ’social collectivity’ is the globalisation of communication, with new trans-national cultures emerging with new understandings, values and lifestyles, and with a novel, emergent relationship between local and global.

“These symbolic communities use global media forms and images, but they re-work and re-shape them in the light of local social experiences. This is particularly evident in the case of contemporary youth cultures, where particular styles of music and visual imagery (graphic design, fashion, video) combine to form new aesthetic ‘languages’ which express and define new social identities.” (Niesyto and Buckingham, 2001, p168)

Buckingham introduces the term ‘glocalisation’ to capture the process of fusion between local cultures on a global scale, and lists Brazilian telenovelas, Japanese animation and Jamaican reggae music as illustrative examples (Buckingham, 2007b p45). The emergence of new technologies has intensified the process of glocalisation (Niesyto and Buckingham, 2001), with the use of new-media becoming more and more pronounced among the youth and children. As a result of the glocalisation of childhood experience, the younger population may relate more closely with their peers across the globe than their own parents or senior relatives (Kenichi Ohmae, 1995, in Buckingham, 2007b, p46). This would strengthen earlier arguments about the grass-roots, democratic, participatory nature of leisure activities supported by new technology. Young generations are habituated to new avenues of collective practice, where relationships are more symmetrical and intellectual endeavours are more experimental or innovative. “We might see YouTube, Second Life, Wikipedia, Flickr, and My Space… as meeting spaces between a range of grass-roots creative communities, each pursuing their own goals, but each helping to shape the total media environment” (Jenkins and Deuze, 2008, pp5-6). Once again, this may be regarded as a shift in the habits of mind of the younger generations, where new technologies (global media) remediate processes of relating, thinking and knowing. The next section will elaborate on the way in which new technology has restructured roles (and rules) of participation, with an obvious impact on our cognitive disposition.

3.4 Changing roles – the technological restructuring of participation

For this section, it seems essential to address two closely related processes: the reintegration of consumption and production and the merger of learner-teacher roles.

‘Prosumers’ (Toffler, 1980, in Logan 2008)

First of all, in participatory cultures centering around new technology, the line between the creation and consumption of media content (idea, knowledge or creative product) has become blurred. McLuhan, as early as in the 1960s, attributed the reintegration of consumption and production to the dawn of computing: “Automation affects not just production, but every phase of consumption and marketing; for the consumer becomes producer in the automation circuit” (McLuhan, 1964, p349). Forty years later, based on extensive review of research, de Freitas and Griffiths (2007) argue that the traditional separation between media (such as press, television and radio) has collapsed. As the previous sections have already indicated, we are currently witnessing the convergence of different modes of old and new media. Consequently, the traditional ‘broadcast model’, with a few people responsible for the production of media content which is to be delivered to large audiences of consumers, no longer applies. In new media settings or ‘activity spaces’ (de Freitas and Griffiths, 2007) the production and consumption of media content are inseparable.

According to commentators on gaming culture, especially on games for educational purposes, production has become a part of the learning process with critical emphasis on the development of learner-driven content (de Freitas and Griffiths, 2007). Also, Dena reflects on how the ‘collective intelligence’ (Levy, 2000) of players resources the jointly-created space of alternative reality games (ARG), moving from ‘primary producer content’ towards ‘participatory creation’ (Dena, 2008, p54). Although the content of these games may have been developed by a primary producer (or a team), through play it becomes the raw material for joint creation by ‘massive global audiences’ (Dena, 2008), which Jenkins describes as collective ‘transmedia storytelling’.

Similarly, when examining the activities on social networking sites, wikis or blogging sites, we also see the fusion of consumption and production. Jenkins (2006c) cites Lenhardt and Maddens’ (2005) report on the Pew Internet and American Life project, which has found that 57% of young internet users could be regarded as ‘media creators’, having been involved in the creation of a blog or a web page, in sharing creative media content (artwork, images, audio or video files) and/or in remixing media content shared by others. The blurred distinction between production and consumption leads Buckingham (2007a) to problematise the notion of ‘audience’ in new (ie digital) media education, arguing that the term does not do justice to the level of engagement digital technology affords. Buckingham (2007a) argues that the term ‘user’ is more appropriate to depict the shift in role, involvement or agency. Indeed, ‘users as producers’ is seen as a key theme in convergent media (Pepler and Kafai, 2007, p13).

However, as Jenkins reminds us, the Pew study did not actually cover all new creative forms that are gaining popularity among the young new media generations. These convergent media include podcasting, game modding and most fascinating of all, machinima. Machinima is a blend of machine and cinema, enabling computer generated cinema production in real time.

“The production of machinima – a portmanteau of machine, cinema and animation – involves computer generated imagery (CGI) rendering using 3D real-time, interactive games engines, rather than the expensive 3D animation software used in the industry… Rendering in this way is done in real-time on PCs using the available tools and resources from the game, which include demo recordings, available camera angles, level and script editors, available backgrounds, characters and skins.” (de Freitas and Griffiths, 2007, p13)

It is a relatively new form of media crossover with a unique range of possibilities. (A website – machinima.com – enables users to gain expertise via tutorials and forums, share their machinima, give feedback on other users’ artwork, or enter contests.) The most special feature of machinima is the way the tools involved are ‘modded’ by the user-producers and developers, and utilised in ways that were not originally intended. So the user-as-producer idea applies to content (modifying shared media content) as well as design (altering the purpose of the media tool).

Note that such playful, inventive application of tools is not restricted to our technological era. Wertsch (1998) has coined the term ‘appropriation’ to conceptualise tool-mediated action and capture the propensity of the human intellect to make these tools ‘our own’. Appropriation means much more than having access to tools: our technical skills and competencies develop through ‘transformative use’ which redefines both the activity and the tool itself. What is unique in the contemporary technological landscape is the extent to which we rely on – or are habituated to – this experimental, probing, inventive mindset. Inventive re-adaptations of, and crossovers between, existing and new technologies reveal the emergence of a new kind of learning (de Freitas and Griffiths, 2007) with media convergence enabling us to use our cognitive capacities in ‘powerful new ways’ (Jenkins, 2006c).

In line with this argument, Gee (2004) contrasts convergent media contexts – defined as experimental, innovative and generative – and formal education settings – described as conservative, static and institutional. Furthermore, Jenkins (2006c) challenges us to view new participatory cultures as a form of ‘hidden curriculum’; arguing that competence in the inventive use of convergent media will be “shaping which youth will succeed and which will be left behind as they enter school and the workplace” (p3). These commentators highlight the need to recognise new (or convergent) media as the educational technology of the future; mainly restricted to informal learning contexts and leisure today, but determining the life experiences of the adults of the future.

Expert and novice – shifting roles

An added aspect of media convergence is the free, democratic distribution of all media content on the world wide web, changing the dynamics between experts and novices. For example, Schaffer and colleagues (Schaffer et al, 2005) describe an online gaming site (Apolyton.net), where access to expertise, information or support is open. The site enables gamers to create and access newsfeeds, to get involved in forums, or to exchange game screenshots and game files; it has its own radio station and university to help newcomers learn the game. Members of the Apolyton.net gaming community have developed a hugely successful learning context, where the roles of the teacher and the learner (expert and novice) are malleable. Through forums, newsfeeds and FAQs, gamers are simultaneously engaged in teaching and learning, and knowledge is created by the open discussion of problems, and the active and voluntary sharing of information, ideas, reflections or solutions.

Similarly, ‘modding’ in online games (where the modder is either a developer or a player with experience in game development) reveals a more horizontal approach, where each modder is involved in the production as well as the consumption of the game (de Freitas and Griffiths, 2007). Furthermore, studying the participation of online fan communities, Black (2005, in Jenkins, 2006c p9) found that participants played the roles of expert and novice simultaneously. Through the process of ‘beta-reading’ (editorial feedback) on individual contributions, they received comments on their own writing (novice) and gained expertise through commenting on other people’s work (expert).

Therefore, the ‘user-as-producer’ mindset is closely linked to the closing gap between the role of the learner and teacher. It is obvious that young generations are breaking away from the traditional transmission model, and are instead habituated to a more democratic, collective approach towards knowledge building. This mindset is in sharp contrast with traditional school practices, with the implication that new media participatory cultures will essentially reshape and reconstruct our understanding of and beliefs about school, culture, community and employment (Jenkins, 2006c).

4. Implications for education

New activity spaces, new skills, new future

“If one takes the view… that human mental activity depends for its full expression upon being linked to a cultural tool kit – a set of prosthetic devices, so to speak – then we are well advised when studying mental activity to take into account the tools employed in that activity.” (Bruner, 1986, p15)

Responding to Bruner’s timely wisdom, this paper explored the fundamental changes in our habits of mind and the consequent transformation of our social practices in the era of new technology.

First, it was shown that the emergence and convergence of new media affords powerful forms of learning, knowing, thinking and problem solving. These habits of intellectual functioning may not all be fundamentally ‘new’ (eg innovative thinking has always been an essential part of human practices); it is the extent to which they pervade our everyday lives that is unprecedented. This is especially so when we look at the leisure activities of the younger generations, mediated by convergent media. The key characteristic features of these new media activity settings were described as:

• increasing complexity, cognitive challenges and stimulation
• mobility and flexibility: multiple pathways for communication and shared practice
• sensory-rich, multimodal representation of media content
• non-linearity and multiple reading paths in our increasingly rich information environment
• continuously evolving, dynamic contexts for mediated activity
• emphasis on interaction and participation; social collectivity
• the reintegration of media consumption and production
• virtual, simulated experience reconnecting thought and practice
• convergence of and multiple crossovers between different new technologies.

Thus, new media contexts create dynamic, continuously evolving, collective arenas of activity, most markedly and immediately so for leisure and informal learning.

Secondly, the paper has shown that, in a co-evolutionary fashion, technological transformations brought about a shift in cognitive preferences, especially among the young generations and those regularly engaged in activities mediated by new, convergent technologies. The characteristics of this new mindset were outlined as:

• cognitive habituation to complexity (eg parallel processing skills, multi-tasking)
• propensity for experimentation: probing, ‘telescoping’; constant re-adaptation and remixing of old and new technologies
• shifting preferences in meaning making and knowledge building from primarily textual content towards multimodal content
• shifting cognitive tendencies from route following towards route mapping; loss of predominance of traditional reading
• new information foraging techniques with increased efficiency (eg power browsing, horizontal information processing)
• engagement in more grassroots, democratic forms of social practice; collective intelligence
• ‘prosumer’ mindset
• habituation to learning through the simulation of embodied experience
• growing capacity to collaborate with others in virtual space.

Thus, new media contexts foster new habits of mind, requiring a fresh understanding of collective action and collective creation, the ability to belong to different social groups that may not meet face-to-face, the skills to artfully reconnect thought and practice in a virtual landscape, and the confidence to establish new relations to authority.

Naturally, while new technology affords certain new ways of thinking, knowing and learning, it may also make more traditional forms (for example reading in the traditional sense) less dominant. It also contributes to the almost overwhelming complexity or ‘hypercomplexity’ (Dena, 2008) of contemporary technological societies. Although beyond the scope of this paper, we need to consider the potential dangers and problems arising from this complexity with regards to identity, personal relationships or real-life physical existence. It is imperative that in our explorations of the technological transformation of social practice we are mindful of these challenges.

Learning or leisure?

It was shown that some of the spontaneously evolving new-media participatory cultures have actually created a cross-over between leisure and institutional learning. Also, commentators highlight the benefits of introducing games (eg ’serious games’ or ‘epistemic games’) (Jenkins, 2006a; Gee, 2004), or digital media production (Erstad and colleagues, 2007; Buckingham, 2003) in educational practices. They note that convergent media may act as the ‘transactional learning space’ between leisure activities and school-based work (Erstad and colleagues, 2007), afford new forms of learning (eg de Freitas and Griffiths, 2008) and thus revolutionise education as we know it (Jenkins, 2006c). However, others (McDougall, 2007; Van Eck, 2006) stress the discrepancy between the style of thinking, learning and knowing prioritised in formal educational contexts and the cognitive mindset afforded by new technology in informal leisure environments. Although we are ready to recognise that young generations are interacting with new technology in novel ways, for most of us (including the young people themselves), this does not count as learning.

Building on Sayer’s conceptualisation, McDougall (2007) argues that the ‘disconnect’ between the world of informal ‘pleasure learning’ and the ’systemworld’ of education is so huge that any attempts to build bridges between the two run into serious difficulties. Indeed, the grassroots, collective style of participatory cultures conflicts with the assessment culture and elitism characteristic of traditional institutional learning, where the emphasis is on individual progress and achievement. Thus, our attempts to import or ‘colonise’ new technology in educational practice without fundamental changes in the institutional structure actually undermines the transformational potentials of this technology for learning, thinking and relating. Using Twining’s (2002) categories, it is essential that we go beyond the introduction of new technology to ’support’ and ‘extend’ pedagogy by allowing new technology to ‘transform’ pedagogical practices.

Possible and plausible futures

Mindful of the tension between the current institutional framework for educational practice and the learning of the future envisaged by commentators, this section will outline possible futures (what could happen) and plausible futures (what is likely happen) (Amara, 1981).

In terms of possible transformations of school-based learning, thinking and knowing, a central feature is that mediated thought and action will become increasingly collective and interactive. This will have a revolutionary impact on education, with participation in various online and face-to-face arenas of activity becoming an integral part of ongoing classroom practices. Learning will take place in a complex world of intersecting paths in virtual and real space, blending formal educational contexts, professional practices and more informal arenas of shared activity. Learning will also become essentially mobile, not tied to the physical space of the classroom, with learners and teachers, novices and experts connecting on a global scale. Note that, as a result of these transformations, the boundaries between what is virtual and real, or what is formal and informal, will also shift or possibly break down. Similarly, we will witness the reformulation of the role of the teacher and the student. Educators and teaching professionals will still play a very crucial part in the education process, but their role will be reconceptualised as an expert advisor or moderator. They will monitor students’ activities and progress, help students make informed choices about their own learning, and support students on their paths towards collective participation, active agency, self-determination and responsible life-learning. Students will have access to different virtual/real participatory frameworks where they can gain skills and knowledge in diverse subject areas. Students will belong to numerous participatory cultures during their years of education, often simultaneously at one given point in time. A key challenge for students will be to manage such layeredness of collective action in overlapping participatory contexts. Schools will function as real-life meeting places, entry points to different participatory settings, and points of orientation (like an air traffic control) from where various participatory engagements will be organised, managed and maintained. The assessment framework will shift towards strategies in line with the participatory and interactive nature of mediated learning, including e-assessment, peer assessment, or the assessment features inherent in particular technologies (eg instant feedback).

A more pessimistic (but equally possible) vision of the future is that nothing changes. Technology will be used to support and expand existing educational practices, but it will not fundamentally transform these. Consequently, the gap between students’ school-based and informal learning experiences will widen. The novel forms of cognitive habituation afforded by new technology will neither be acknowledged nor fostered in school-based settings.

So what is our vision of possible futures? It is best to envisage multiple, parallel paths, each positioned somewhere in between the two extremes, with a varying degree of transformation involved. These multiple paths are made possible by the multidirectionality of the envisioned changes, involving both top-down processes (eg governmental initiatives to redesign curricular content or pedagogic strategies) and bottom-up influences. The optimism that the grassroots route has an equally strong influence stems from the observable changes in attitudes towards children in the public arena, for example, the recognition of the importance of listening to children’s voices and perspectives in the government publication ‘Every Child Matters’ (2004, cited in Sheehy and Bucknall, 2008). Interest in developing a framework for ‘learner consultation’ through theorising, research and innovative practice has been growing (see, for example, the ‘Consulting Pupils about Teaching and Learning Project’ by Rudduck (2006), the work of the Children’s Research Centre (2005) involving children and young people as researchers, or Sheehy and Bucknall’s (2008) study on children’s visions of technology and education). Therefore, top-down initiatives for change may actually be informed and prompted by the perspectives of children and young people. Yet, as Sheehy and Bucknall’s (2008) study indicates, consideration of children’s voices needs to be combined with support in developing the skills necessary to reflect on, formulate and voice one’s perspectives and envisage change: “we need to equip learners with the conceptual tools to reflect on learning and how it occurs” (pp111-112).

Nevertheless, we should be encouraged by the collaborative efforts of policy makers, researchers and educators to predict possible educational futures with new technology. The Beyond Current Horizons programme, conducted with the DCSF (Department for Children, Schools and Families), the extensive CIBER project on the Google generation (2008), the wide range of research commissioned and managed by BECTA, or the work carried out by the Schome Research group (www.schome.ac.uk), are all illustrative of the intense social and intellectual focus on envisaging an education system for ‘the Information Age’. To conclude with Margaret Mead’s refreshing thoughts published in Time magazine in the 1950s:

“There are too many complaints about society having to move too fast to keep up with the machine. There is great advantage in moving fast if you move completely, if social, educational, and recreational changes keep pace. You must change the whole pattern at once and the whole group together – and the people themselves must decide to move.” (1954, cited in McLuhan, 1964, p28)

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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.