What Happens Next? Looking towards a future e-learning

landscape

Keri FacerResearch Director, NESTA Futurelab

www.nestafuturelab.org

16.11.05

About Futurelab

• Est. 2001 to bring together creative, education, technology and research communities to create ‘future learning environments’

• R&D programme - prototypes• Research programme - evidence• Events - communities• Publications – sharing lessons learnt. See:

– http://www.nestafuturelab.org/research/lit_reviews.htm

Formal

Informal

Real Virtual

School

Cultural Sector

Broadcast TV

Internet

From Hawkey, 2004

Blurring the Boundaries

Savannah Project

• Collaboration between Futurelab, BBC NHU, MRL Nottingham Uni, Hewlett Packard

• Working with disaggregated content, mobile & GPS, games server – to create new learning experience that enables new ways of engaging with information

• Video

Projects: Mudlarking

• Collaboration between Goldsmiths College, Futurelab & Mobile Bristol

• Working to create interactive ‘learning landscape’ overlaying the real world

Key Principles for developing resources for a connected learning landscape

• Understand learners• Understand the potential of new

technologies

Understanding LearnersPrinciple Challenges• What do people already do/know?• What do people find hard to understand?• What engages and interests them?• What resources are available to support

understanding and engagement? • What changes does this effect?

Processes:• Reviewing existing research evidence• Early concept trials with users• Iterative design & co-design• Trials evaluating learning experiences – not just

usability

Understanding technologies• Offer possibilities but do not determine what is possible.

Our imagination and our sense of learner needs determines what we do:

Possibilities:• Personalisation and mobility – resources in the hands of

the learners and carried between different spaces – coherent narratives between different experiences, reflection

• Intelligent and disappearing technologies – getting smaller, getting smarter, learning about the learner – prompts for learners, expert mentors

• The ‘digital landscape’ – a new ‘layer’ on reality with GPS – learning in situ

• New spaces – virtual spaces, online spaces, collaborative spaces – new forms of collaborative learning

• Decentralised – brought by and created by learners in collaboration with institutions constructivist learning, self and group created

Emerging Worlds

• MMORPGs

Alternative Worlds

• SecondLifeTravel on foot, or by planes, trains, and flying saucers; gondolas, fuel-injected muscle cars, mechanical unicorns, fearsome gun ships, giant snails, smog-belching mech robots, stardust-powered magic broomsticks—or on your own power, with the innate ability that all Residents have, to teleport and fly at will Change your reality with simple but sophisticated 3D creation tools: build houses, design furniture; create clothing, jewellery, and art Invest time and ingenuity in a fully integrated economy   Advertise and sell your business to a city-sized population of consumers Exchange the Linden Dollars you earn for real dollars, and vice versa Donate your earnings to in-world projects, or real world non-profit causes and organizations Host your own social events for love, fun, and profit Fall in love, get married at a virtual service—and officially designate your Second Life partner

The future?

Exciting - Challenging - Huge Possibilities

The distributed cultural institution: geographical and institutional boundaries can be overcome

The ‘intelligent’ cultural institution: learning about and adapting to learners

The user generated cultural institution: creating opportunities for collaborative production of knowledge

Learner at the Centre of the new learning landscape

Find out more: www.nestafuturelab.orgContact:

Keri.Facer@nestafuturelab.org

Key areas of work:Learning in schools, homes, cultural

institutions, mediaComputer gamesDisappearing & intelligent computersMobile learningChildren as researchers