I spoke about technology in education at the Future of the Book Conference at the end of June. The conference was great fun. I was there for the second day – for perspectives on the whole conference, check out these posts by Virginia and Matthew.
I talked about how technology is changing the way young people organise themselves and take action, access information and learn, connect with each other, create and publish to audiences, and consume services and products. I talked about how we might design learning experiences for these young people.
How digital technology is changing the way young people learn, create and consume.
New technologies, new practices, new learning – the result should be new approaches to educational publishing. Did we get that at the conference? I’m not sure we did.
The future of reading and learning
If we focus on book formats and technologies to the exclusion of exploring changes in the social and cultural practices associated with using technology, it’s inevitable that the future of the book is pretty much going to be a book. If we want to open the debate and explore the possibilities beyond the book, then we need to consider the future of reading and the future of learning to get to the future of publishing.
We also need to call a halt to the unhelpful dichotomy that pits publisher-produced, ‘credible’, ‘superior’ content against user-created, ‘unreliable’, ‘inferior’ content. If we’re truly going to follow market trends, as conference speakers proposed, then we have to pay attention to interacting and collaborating with our audiences as well as producing quality content.
Opportunities for publishers
So what are the opportunities for educational publishers?
- To become experts in designing learning experiences and environments that maximise the affordances of technology and support educators to understand the limitations and the benefits of technology.
- To engage directly with our communities of learners on a longer term basis – curating their experience of our products and responding to their interpretations and the learning experiences that they bring to the table.
From an education perspective, we need to engage young people’s cultural and social practices and provide opportunities for transformative learning (a shift from filling students’ heads with facts to including opportunities for students to do something with their knowledge). We can support teachers to be effective in the classroom through our learning designs.
I think publishers can commission, write, design and curate across the range of media and in multimodal forms (thanks to Meg Pickard, Communities and Interaction Manager at The Guardian, for this notion of ‘curating’). Publishers should use whatever media is most appropriate to bring together content and community to tell their story.
I think publishers can plan for and predict likely interaction with audiences and contribute an editorial or curatorial role that influences and creates community – without scripting that interaction to the point where participants can’t relate their own experiences to it.
Some examples
Some examples heading in worthwhile directions:
- DigitalNZ’s memory maker lets users remix content (how cool would it be if users could also upload their own content for remixing?).
- On the Learnz virtual fieldtrips – from volcanoes to marine reserves – students stay at school but visit places they would never otherwise go and interact with people they would never otherwise meet – supported by background materials and activities, audioconferencing, images and videos uploaded daily.
- And a suggestion for converting a print publication to online (I’ve blogged about this before). What learning could we make available if the fabulous Journal of Young People’s Writing were a blog? Instead of publishing completed student work in a fixed format, we could publish student work with great potential – with a great opening, a great ending or great dialogue. Invite writer David Hill to critique and explore. Invite other students to comment and illustrate. Invite graphic artist Ali Teo to respond to the illustrators. Draw comparisons and contrasts with work by other writers. Turn the existing model inside out by exposing the workings that are past and hidden by the time classrooms receive the print version.
The slides from my presentation are here.
