Digital R&D fund for the arts
Education and learning
Podcast 5 transcript
John Wilson:
Hello and welcome to the fifth in a series of podcasts by Arts Council England,
looking at key digital topics brought to light by the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts.
That’s the £7 million investment in digital projects across the arts sector, delivered
by Arts Council England, NESTA and the Arts & Humanities Research Council in
partnership.
This programme is all about education and learning in the arts. How can digital
technology assist in education of the young and the mature, those with disabilities
and perhaps those for whom the arts have previously not been accessible? In this
podcast we’ll be looking at what technology is available for young learners in the
classroom.
Guest:
What most classrooms have now got is the computer, there are speakers, there’s
a projector and there is the capacity to play these recordings. By having them
available on a website, they’re just there, you can just immediately access them.
John Wilson:
How the British Library are promoting digital education with their English Online
website.
Guest:
This is an opportunity for us to show the context, so, digitising historical,
sociological and political documents that illustrate the perspective in which that
also was writing.
John Wilson:
How some believe technology should replace a defunct education system.
Guest:
The system we have was actually built in the eighteenth century to serve an
industrialised society. Now we’re an information society and information is more
freely available to us in ways it wasn’t available before.
John Wilson:
But first to my guests on the programme today. Joining me in the studio are Max
Whitby from Touch Press, Dave Patten from the Science Museum and Kirsten
Campbell-Howes from an organisation called Soda.
Let’s get a bit of background first of all. Kirsten, tell us something about Soda; what
do you do?
Kirsten Campbell-Howes:
Well, Soda is a small creative digital agency based in London. It’s been around for
about 16 years. We make things that bridge the physical and digital divide. I think
the thing we’re probably the best known for, though, is Soda Constructor, which is
a web app where you use physics simulations to build models.
John Wilson:
Max Whitby, on the Touch Press website you state books are one of the defining
inventions of civilisation and today they’re poised for a revolution. Tell us more.
Max Whitby:
Well, I do believe that’s the case. One of the ways that books are evolving is by
moving of course onto electronic devices, becoming e-books. We are not
interested at Touch Press in e-books just as if they were transferring the text. The
kind of books that we make are the sort of books that Harry Potter would open,
where things pop off the page, where the reader gets to interact with the content. I
think for learning, that’s a really exciting development.
John Wilson:
Dave Patten, the Science Museum, I suppose there you have a vast array already
of initiatives for education and learning?
Dave Patten:
We do. The educational audience is a big part of our audience. We get 400,000
school children a year into the museum, so part of our offer is targeted towards
that group of people. We’re interested in digital technologies, not just for the things
we do physically in the museum but it’s a way of getting the museum out to the
public.
John Wilson:
Well, we’ll explore that throughout the programme, but I’d like to begin the
discussion today by looking at some strategies for digital learning within the arts
sector. This is perhaps a provocative thought, from Mick Landmann from Digital
Education Brighton.
Mick Landmann:
The idea that one teacher teaches 30 kids the same thing at the same time in the
same place - that’s no longer necessary, because with digital technology each of
those kids can be learning the things that they want to learn that’s appropriate to
them. This also of course changes the whole notion of place, because if you can
use digital technology and online technology and mobile technology, of course you
don’t have to cram 30 kids into a classroom.
There’s a whole movement at the moment called BYOD, which is Bring Your Own
Device. This is a movement around recognising that technology is there, that
everybody has technology, and that within an education environment they ought to
be able to avail themselves of the technology that they’re comfortable with.
95 per cent of schools in this country extraordinarily ban the use of smartphones in
class. Now, kids, they’re all taking their smartphones and feature phones into the
classroom, they’re using them in the classroom, they’re very adept at texting
underneath the desk. Yet schools still choose to ban phones.
What is happening at the moment, the kids are using their mobile phone anyway,
but this is completely unregulated. Would it not be better for schools to say ‘Not
only is it okay to bring your smartphones into class, it’s compulsory to do so’? ‘We
want to see them on top of your desk.’ Then you can control that environment.
Then, by the way, ‘Oh, we’ve got all of these things which are really good
computers, generally very up to date; maybe we can make some use of those
within our lessons.’
John Wilson:
Well, let’s pick up on that point made by Mick Landmann there. That idea of
BYOD, Bring Your Own Device, is that something that’s practical or desirable?
Dave Patten, an approach that you’d encourage at the Science Museum?
Dave Patten:
Absolutely. We’ve spent I guess the last year putting infrastructure in place to
support that, we recognise that people are increasingly bringing smartphones into
the museum, we want to provide opportunities for people to use those phones.
The biggest barrier for that in the museum environment was the unpredictability of
cost. We’ve just spent the last year putting in wireless infrastructure so that we
take away that cost. Now looking at rolling out various pilot programmes onto
people’s mobile devices.
John Wilson:
Is compatibility a problem, though? Because I assume if everybody’s bringing in a
different kind of device they’re not all going to be able to read the systems in the
same way.
Dave Patten:
It’s an issue at the moment but it’s probably an issue that will go away in a couple
of years’ time. We’re choosing to experiment on particular types of devices,
because we want to improve technique. Once we’re confident in that then we’ll roll
that out to more platforms.
John Wilson:
Kirsten, you’re shaking your head; you don’t agree?
Kirsten Campbell-Howes:
Well, I agree absolutely with everything your speaker there said. In the Science
Museum that’s a perfect environment where you can utilise smartphones for this
kind of thing. Schools are a very different story I think, at the moment. Hopefully in
a few years it won’t be such an issue when we have all agreed on what bit of kit
we want students to be using, but at the moment telling kids that it’s compulsory to
bring a smartphone into class, that’s going to cause all kinds of problems. Because
not everyone can afford one, everyone’s got a different kind…
One of the things that we do at Soda at the moment is we’re working an iPad app
for primary school kids to help them with their literacy and maths. We’re working
with a publisher towards that. There is a move towards this, definitely. But it’s slow
in the schools environment and it’s not going to be happening now.
John Wilson:
Max Whitby, at Touch Press, I asked Dave there about that question of
compatibility. Is that something that you’re having to bear in mind when you’re
developing apps and resources?
Max Whitby:
What we’re interested in doing is producing the kind of materials that a teacher can
use to get a class really engaged and excited. I think that communal learning
where there’s a campfire and people gather round it and get excited about
something is really important. That is how we learn. Learning on your own out in
the dark you won’t necessarily pick up all those things. There’s a place for that, but
I’m really interested in strengthening the teacher’s position with electronic
approaches.
John Wilson:
Well, I’d like to move it on now and look at some of the tools of the trade for digital
learning within the arts. A company based in Worcester called C&T teach drama to
kids using new technologies. As Paul Sutton, C&T’s Artistic Director, explains.
Paul Sutton:
One of them is called ‘The Living Newspaper’, which is an online reinvention of a
1920s theatre form, which was about making documentary dramas about topical
issues and news stories of the day. We’ve created an online version of that where
young people are plunged into a secret covert network where they work as citizen
journalists uncovering news stories, and sharing that through a range of social
media online.
Another one is called Strata, which is a digital mapping tool that allows young
people to build digital maps of their local areas. Not really as tools to enable
people to find their way around, but as a way of exploring local history, themes and
content within their local area, aspects of the curriculum. When you’ve finished
making your Strata map, that’s published to tablets and smartphones so that local
residents in the area can navigate their way around these maps, click on
multimedia content and see the work that young people have created.
John Wilson:
That’s a resource being developed by C&T. Max, a moment ago you talked about
your titles that you’re developing – give us a couple of examples.
Max Whitby:
Well, there’s one we’re just about to release in partnership with Michael Morpurgo,
the children’s writer. We’ve taken his fantastic book ‘War Horse’ and produced an
interactive edition. Of course ‘War Horse’ is set during the First World War, and it’s
pretty chronological. One of the things we do in that title is have Michael perform
‘War Horse'. But also, as the story unfolds, we provide a historical timeline.
What we’re hoping is that children reading the story, getting interested in the
events and the circumstances, are motivated to dive off into a historical timeline
and find out more about the First World War. Hear experts talk about the First
World War and use the emotional power of a great storyteller to engage people
with the subject.
The clip we just heard was I guess advocating a different approach which I think is
equally good and valid. That’s to engage people with the subject through building
something, especially building something together. The difficulty with that
approach is often it makes an amazing presentation when you see somebody
explain how it should work, but actually putting a complicated tool like that into the
hands of a group of children, it sometimes can be very successful, but many times
people get lost and don’t quite understand how to use it. We’d quite like to
package information and knowledge in ways that can be called on when you’re
stuck.
John Wilson:
Kirsten Campbell-Howes, give us an example of something that you’re developing
there at Soda at the moment. Some of the challenges that you’re facing.
Kirsten Campbell-Howes:
Well, one of the things we’re developing at the moment is an iPad app called
Moovl. It’s a version of Soda Constructor but for younger children. I think some of
the challenges we’ve been finding with that are crafting a user interface that is
intuitive for children. One of the things we like about the iPad is that you don’t just
have to have one person using the iPad; you can have a group of two or three kids
around it. It sort of encourages a bit of interaction.
What I don’t like personally is shots of classrooms where each child is hunched
over one device. I think that’s not really what we want in education; we want to
encourage collaboration and teamwork and discussion.
John Wilson:
An element of play as well, is what you’re bringing there. Which brings us on,
actually –in an earlier podcast in the series we heard how gaming is being used
throughout the arts sector. Here’s a survey of teachers conducted in 2010 by
NESTA: 67 per cent of teachers said they used video games and animation
technology to support learning in the classroom. All of them, 100 per cent, said
they’d use it again. Well, here’s Paul Sutton of C&T again on the ways that gaming
can play a part in education.
Paul Sutton:
Games and gamification are very much at the heart of young people’s culture and
their values. It seems very sensible to us to build that into our applications and our
approach to making creative practice in classrooms with young people. We don’t
see a huge difference between using techniques in theatre, such as Boal’s forum
theatre methodologies, or things like role-play or process drama techniques, and
exactly some of the processes you might see in videogames.
You might find yourself in some kind of first-person shooter game, stuck in a
particular problem. You have to decide whether to go left or right, to make a
choice; there are consequences to your actions. All those things that happen in a
video game are exactly the same things that you might experience as part of a
process drama or a roleplaying activity.
John Wilson:
Here’s another example as part of an initiative from Tate Kids, a website for 6 to
12 year olds which aims to get kids to find out more about the arts. Wondermind is
funded by the Welcome Trust. It’s an interactive game that ties art and science
together using the narrative of Alice in Wonderland, based on a recent exhibition at
Tate Liverpool. Sharna Jackson, Editor of Tate Kids, takes us through the game.
Sharna Jackson:
You have four games that illustrate a key component in children’s neuro-physical
development. We give the children a bit of text up front. ‘Small parts that make up
the brain called neurons are more connected in children’s brains than adult brains.’
The aim of this game is to keep as many pathways open as possible while
capturing the white rabbit. This mirrors what happens in a child’s brain, or in
anyone’s brain, really. The more you use the pathways in your brain, the stronger
they become. The less you use them, the quicker they die off and become
redundant.
The aim of this game is not just to catch the rabbit; it’s actually to go in a deviant
manner across the park to keep as many pathways open as possible. Because
that’s what gets you to the rabbit. If you notice, the pathways are becoming
covered up as I no longer use them. The game ends when you can’t meet the
rabbit.
Voiceover:
That game had a big mass of pathways in it. Well, funnily enough, your brain does
too. Click the button, and you can see why.
Sharna Jackson:
Now you’re led to a piece of interactive video where the kids can answer questions
interactively and meet scientists who are actually working in the field.
John Wilson:
That’s Sharna Jackson at Tate Kids playing her way through the Wondermind
game. We heard earlier Paul Jackson talking about gamification, Dave. That’s
something you would encourage at the Science Museum, is it?
Dave Patten:
It’s something we do. Gamifying content is a way of taking people into that content,
often when they don’t realise that’s what you’re doing. It’s a way of starting them
down a path and then you can build deeper engagement.
We have for quite a long time built interactive games, both physically in the
museum and online. Large numbers of people play those, and we have a physics
game called Launchball which has been downloaded by over six million people.
John Wilson:
Some sceptics may say ‘Well, if the kids are in there playing the games, they’re
not going to be taking the science too serious.’ But in fact it’s the other way round
then, is it?
Dave Patten:
It’s two things, I think. One is that they actually do take away the science, and
we’re very careful when we build games to make sure there is good scientific
content in there. We’re quite interested as well in actually the similarity between
gameplay and the scientific process. That it’s about setting up hypotheses and
testing those, and reviewing that and coming back in, and changing things and
doing things again. By playing those games, quite often you’re learning things
about scientific process as well as the content we’re trying to deliver.
John Wilson:
Here’s another arts teaching resource. The Poetry Archive is a website which aims
to, in their words, help make poetry accessible, relevant and enjoyable to a wide
audience. Julie Blake, Education Manager of the archive, explains how it’s used by
the teachers.
Julie Blake:
What they use it for is playing recordings in class. They particularly like that when
the recordings are of poets with marked accents, or where the poem makes use of
dialect features that perhaps they might find difficult or uncomfortable to read
aloud in class. They like the fact that it brings the poem off the page.
Often what they say is that students suddenly realise that poets are people. When
it’s printed in a book on a page it’s just stuff for English. It’s one of the affordances
of digital technology that we can do this in a way that we couldn’t do before without
taking students to a live performance. It doesn’t take that away either. Often what
happens is that what we hope is that students will enjoy listening to poetry as
spoken word. Will then think later in their lives, or when there’s a school trip
offered or whatever, ‘Oh yes, I’d like to go and actually hear a poet. That would be
a good thing to do.’
John Wilson:
Julie Blake of the Poetry Archive there, on ways in which poetry can be brought to
life in new ways, the kids can hear the accents and the dialects of the poets
themselves. Max Whitby, Touch Press developed ‘The Waste Land’ app, in fact,
didn’t it. That was bringing T. S. Eliot’s poem to life in a new way, in a similar way
to this.
Max Whitby:
Very much so, yes. We did that in partnership with Faber & Faber. The original title
of ‘The Waste Land’ was actually ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’, which is a
Dickens quote. Actually it’s one of the keys to understanding that extraordinary
poem, one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century.
In the app what we did is film Fiona Shaw, the great Irish actor, perform ‘The
Waste Land’ for half an hour in an empty house in Dublin. In the course of that half
hour she essentially explains the poem with her bare teeth. She does all the
different voices, and just watching and listening to her performance you get it. In
the app, we tie her performance very tightly to every line of the poem. If you want,
you can just read the poem, but if you would like to bring alive one of the stanzas,
you can just touch the lineJohn Wilson:
Takes it back to the source text… The original manuscript, in fact.
Max Whitby:
Indeed, we offer that as well. It’s layers of information that come on top. But the
performance of the poem is something that in a classroom context I think would be
exactly one of these things I was talking about earlier, where you can really
empower a teacher. Just take ‘Death by Water’, a one minute section of the poem.
Play that to a class and I think you will engage a lot of minds.
John Wilson:
Well, let’s look at a different age group now, and we’re turning to a project from
Oxford University, home to the Bodleian Library, which is aiming to reach out to
learners of undergraduate age and beyond, through digital techniques. Melissa
Highton, Director of Academic IT and Head of Learning Technologies Group at
Oxford, explains the university’s approach to the digital opportunities for learning.
Melissa Highton:
One of the things that Oxford is able to do is, because we have such a rich
collection of all the contextual materials, we are spending time digitising those and
putting up material that can be used by teachers in schools and by learners all
over the world. We have a large collection called ‘The Great Writers Inspire’
collection, which started with Shakespeare but has actually gone onto include
many other writers now.
In that collection you can see learning material, podcasts, videos, a lot of stuff that
the academics at Oxford have recorded specially for the project, which never
existed before. Conversations about the writers, discussions of how the topics fit in
the context. We’ve worked very closely with school teachers to make sure that the
kinds of materials we’re producing are the kinds of materials that they would be
able to use and want to use in their teaching.
John Wilson:
Melissa Highton from Oxford University. Well, that ‘Great Writers Inspire’ project is
clearly a massive resource being made freely available. Dave Patten, is this
something we’re going to see all national institutions, and I suppose is there an
obligation on the publically funded national institutions to do this sort of thing? To
make all of their resources freely available, to share digitally?
Dave Patten:
Absolutely. We, along with lots of other big museums, are looking at how we open
source all of our content. We don’t have the time or the resource to tell all of the
stories about all of the things we own, and actually lots of other people have
expertise and could use that. We’re working at the moment to get that content out
to other people and to explore the ways in which other people can start to work
with our content, and how we bring some of that back into the museum.
I think we’re increasingly moving away from a situation where we expect people
are only going to visit the museum website to get our content. They’re going to
expect to find our content in lots of places, and actually the museum website isn’t
necessarily the first port of call for lots of people when they’re doing web searches.
We want to make our content as widely available to people. Actually we don’t
really care where they come across it, as long as they recognise that actually the
content came initially from the museum.
John Wilson:
Now, digital technology in the arts has often been used as a tool for allowing
access to learners with disabilities. The Jodi Awards, set up by an organisation
called The Jodi Mattes Trust, recognise digital innovation that enables access to
the arts for disabled people. Earlier I asked Marcus Weisen of the Jodi Mattes
Trust whether he foresees a time when all cultural organisations will make special
provision for disabled people.
Marcus Weisen:
Not only do we stop thinking of something specifically for disabled people, but
something for all. That the technology that is available is actually deployed for all
so that we have a completely inclusive concept.
There are so many handheld devices now, so many multimedia experiences to be
had in museums. There are so-called touch screens, so that everybody would
think ‘Well, that’s good for blind folks.’ No, a touch screen is completely flat, is
notoriously inaccessible to a blind user unless it has been devised in a way that
builds in an interface for blind users.
Similarly, when we get those [other guides and multimedia guides, very seldom do
the producers of guides, and also the museums and cultural organisations
themselves, think about how can those exhibitions and collections be made
accessible. This could be involving all the description of exhibits for blind and
partially sighted people. It could mean providing British Sign Language, it could
mean using a form of English sometimes called Easy English that actually could
be hugely enjoyable to everyone.
But beyond that, I think we have a really greater issue for museum work involved
here, which is it’s not just making an exhibition that has been created already
accessible, but planning accessibility in right from the start within every budget.
That actually also means that once you adopt inclusive design exhibition concepts,
which allow maximum physical and digital accessibility for disabled people and all
public.
John Wilson:
Marcus Weisen. One Jodi Award winning project was run by the National Trust
and used panoramic digital photography to enable access to National Trust
properties. Heather Smith from the National Trust, and Richard Crowest of
Corvidae, the company who developed the technology, explain more.
Heather Smith:
What was important to us as we set up the group of people who were going to lead
the project was that we had a range of people with disabilities, and also people
who are non-disabled, so that we could actually get those different points of view.
We went with some of our volunteers who are disabled, who are happy to give
their time. We have a gentleman who is blind; we worked with a couple of
colleagues who have hearing loss. We also tried to make the designs as easy as
possible to use for people with dyslexia, so we did some trialling and testing with
people with those particular requirements.
Richard Crowest:
First of all you’d quite possibly find the thing running with its screensaver, which
shows a selection of stills of the property and invites you to touch the screen. From
there you can choose to either look at a plan of the property, look at its floor plans
and choose a room. Or you can just touch the ‘start the tour’ button and it will take
you round the house or the park in the same sort of route that a physical visitor
would take.
Heather Smith:
I think the virtual tours, in terms of learning about National Trust properties, give a
variety of ways in which you can develop your own visitor experience. We talk a lot
about visitor experience now in the organisation, rather than the word ‘learning’, as
such. I think virtual tours give an opportunity for people to delve that bit deeper
than they perhaps might be able to from a general walk-around visit.
Richard Crowest:
In each room or area what you’ll usually have is a panorama which allows you to
look right round the room, right up to the ceiling. You can zoom in on details; you
can look at the things that interest you. Again there’ll be some brief introductory
text about that particular room or area, but then also there’ll be a number of points
of interest that the property team have chosen as the most significant items in that
room. The panorama will automatically turn and zoom to show you where the
object is in the room.
Heather Smith:
One of the good things, actually, about the tours was that it gave us an opportunity
to show aspects of the properties that nobody could get into. Some of the views
from the roofs, for example, some of the rooms that just weren’t open to visitors
but that we were actually happy to show in a different way.
Richard Crowest:
I think one of the key things with education, particularly when it comes to heritage,
is the fact of context. You can tell people as much information as you like about a
subject, you can show them photographs of an object, but a virtual tour enables
you to see those objects and learn about them in their context .Not just necessarily
the room but the whole building, the history of that building, its development over
time. I think putting things in context, allowing people to explore and follow their
own interests educationally is something that you can do with this kind of
technology that you can’t necessarily do with a linear format like a video, a
television programme or a book, in the same way.
John Wilson:
Richard Crowest and Heather Smith at the National Trust. Kirsten, the
development of technology is happening at such a pace, isn’t it? But it seems to
be, from what we’re hearing, enabling more access. It’s enabling education in a
way that was inconceivable before.
Kirsten Campbell-Howes:
Yes, it is. I was thinking while those two were speaking just then about a company
that I’ve recently heard of called SpecialEffect, whose focus is encouraging games
developers to build in this accessibility from the outset. I think it’s something we
need to think about much, much more. It is quite easy to convert some quite
complex games to be used by people with disabilities, but it’s just not something
that flashes across the radar of your average games developer.
John Wilson:
It’s a matter of moving away from the idea of an organisation or a museum or a
gallery having disabled access, or access to educational resources. But just
everything being accessible without that differentiation. Dave.
Dave Patten:
Yes, one of the things that’s really quite exciting as we move into this Bring Your
Own Device world that we’re coming to, is actually you can have the device that
works for you as an individual. Actually what we worry about is how we get the
appropriate content onto that device. If you are a blind person, you have a device
that’s with you that you know how to use; you can take that content away from.
Our job is to get that content onto your device. Then we don’t have to worry about
having lots of disparate devices in the museum, but we can still get the content to
people as they want to consume it.
I think that’s across the board; it’s not just for people with disabilities. It means any
visitor can come to the museum. You have the device that you’re most comfortable
with using, you know how to use it, and that’s how you manage your experience in
the museum.
John Wilson:
Well let’s move on again. Much of what we’ve been talking about in this
programme revolves around learning for young people, either as part of the
national curriculum or outside the school environment. Now let’s look at lifelong
learning. Alex Whitfield, Learning and Digital Programmes Manager at the British
Library, tells us about the British Library Learning website.
Alex Whitfield:
Online I think we’re much more focused on young people currently. There’s a
completely separate section of the site which is under redevelopment which is the
online gallery, which has been the arena for lifelong learners accessing their
content. But we’re hoping to bring that in, because everything we do does have
lifelong learners as one of its core key audiences.
For example, the history timeline’s interactive; it encourages that serendipitous
learning, which I think is sometimes key for lifelong learners who aren’t necessarily
answering the exam question or looking for a specific piece of information, but
they’re browsing the web. The timeline is essentially a timeline which maps our
collections – that is the collections on the British Library Learning site –
chronologically. You can speed through the centuries from about 1200 to the
present day, and pull out collection items that you want to look at. There’s curated
information and links back to the main website there.
I think that really answers the need of some lifelong learners, because of that
serendipitous nature. I guess that non-search-based approach.
John Wilson:
Alex Whitfield on the opportunities for lifelong learning at the British Library. Now,
back to the classroom. A recent Department of Education report said ‘Instant
feedback by teachers and peers via online discussion forums enable pupils to
improve their work. Often the use of technologies transformed group work in
lessons giving a real focus for greater interaction and collaboration between
pupils.’
This all ties in with the idea of feedback loops, the two-way process of digital
learning at one of the digital R&D pilot projects at the Battersea Arts Centre.
Feedback loops were used to develop artistic projects. Katherine Jewkes, Digital
Producer for the Battersea Arts Centre, explains the Scratch Online project.
Katherine Jewkes:
Scratch Online is trying to translate the real-life scratch process into a digital
setting. The real-life scratch process is one where artists will create work, share it
with an audience and get feedback on it. What we’re trying to do is create an
online forum, a space, for that sort of interaction to happen.
Artists will be able to log on to this online community, share fragments of their work
with an audience and get feedback, which will then inform the next iteration of their
work. This could either be through posting pictures of what they’re doing or audio,
or it could be through video or live-streaming. All the kinds of digital language that
we have in our world should be brought together in a space where people can
scratch work online together.
John Wilson:
There’s Katherine Jewkes at the Battersea Arts Centre. That’s the idea of the twoway process, the creative possibilities of so-called ‘feedback loop’. Max, any more
examples of the way that works?
Max Whitby:
We tried to do that in another poetry title, actually, in ‘The Sonnets’ – Shakespeare
sonnets which we published earlier this year. Each sonnet performed by an actor
but with all the text and so on elaborated. You can have Dr. Who, David Tennant,
read a sonnet for you, or Patrick Stewart.
We included in there a rather I suppose brave thing, which is we gave away all the
sonnets on our website free. We allow anyone using the sonnet to send it to a
friend who has the app, or to tweet it or to send it by e-mail, or post it on their
Facebook page. That way we get a dialogue going between people using ‘The
Sonnets’ title and their wider group of friends.
John Wilson:
Kirsten Campbell-Howes, I presume that when you’re developing new apps or
digital software for the educational environment, this idea of the feedback loop is
absolutely vital, isn’t it?
Kirsten Campbell-Howes:
Absolutely. It starts with your user testing, but ideally it continues on in the lifecycle
of the game. With Soda Constructor, for example, a huge aspect of it was
something that was completely beyond our control, which was the forums, where
our users were building sometimes extremely complex guides on how to build
particular models. There was a huge and very, very active forum community. In a
sense the users were educating themselves.
That is something that I think we would aim to reproduce in other products that we
build. It adds this whole extra dimension to what you’re creating. Sometimes you
have no control over that, so you have to be prepared for that.
John Wilson:
Increasing the education within the creative context is not being necessarily
prescribed, but is evolving, because of this two-way process?
Kirsten Campbell-Howes:
Yes, I think some of the best products allow for that to happen. They’re not so
constrained that you’re only following a certain channel of learning. There is room
there for you to develop your own theories, to share your own ideas - to take that
application or whatever it is and make it your own, and share that with other
people who use it.
Max Whitby:
There’s a really interesting measure of success on that as well, isn’t there. You
start off and it’s usually a conversation between the museum or the agency and a
group of people. Actually if you get to that point where you can step away from that
conversation and it carries on without you, so your users are talking to each other
and sustaining thatJohn Wilson:
It has a life of its own.
Max Whitby:
Yes, that’s a really interesting place to get to.
John Wilson:
Well, we’ve looked at many learning opportunities that are mainly delivered
through the web, but what about physical installations and location learning?
Kirsten, I think this is something that Soda, your company, are particularly involved
with. What are the benefits of location-based digital learning as opposed to taking
away the online learning?
Kirsten Campbell-Howes:
There are many. I think for one it’s a lot more immersive. You’re physically there
with what you’re doing and you’re moving your body, often, with a location-based
game. Or you’re standing up or you’re looking at things and moving around and
interacting with the real environment around you.
John Wilson:
Are there specific examples, or anybody else that’s got an example of what we’re
talking about here, the location-based digital learning?
Dave Patten:
I think it’s what museums-
John Wilson:
It’s what you’re doing anyway.
Dave Patten:
Museums have a sense of place. For us, yes, the really interesting experiment
we’re running at the moment is around Web Lab, that we built an exhibition that’s
physically in the museum that people can come into the museum. But also you can
come online into that space and you share that space with the people that are
physically in the museum.
What you do is control real physical things, so you control robots, you play musical
instruments. It isn’t just a screen interaction; it’s an interaction with real physical
devices. It’s an interaction with the other people that are in that space, be they
physically in the space or other online users that are sharing that space. It’s that
integration, really, between the online world and the physical world that’s about
building real physical things.
I guess an example of the internet of things, it’s a collection of big machines in the
museum, or big interactive pieces, that are all controlled through screen-based
systems. You do that either by coming into the museum and being in proximity of
those devices, or you do that online. But if you do that online you see video feeds
of that physical space as well. You are controlling those real things in the museum.
John Wilson:
We’ve been talking throughout this programme about existing resources. We’ve
reached the point in the podcast where we do a bit of crystal ball gazing. I suppose
one of the main things to have come out of this programme is that we can’t ignore
technologies, digital technology within the educational environment. Maybe in the
future it will be the way of educating – we don’t need teachers, we don’t need
schools. Max?
Max Whitby:
Well, I very strongly disagree with that point of view. I think teachers always have
been and always will be at the core of learning. What technology can do is amplify
it, help empower them, and also can customise the learning experience for
students, so that each individual can learn at the pace in the subject areas that
most interest them. I think technology is all about fitting into our world, not the
world changing to fit technology.
John Wilson:
Kirsten, do you see any major developments in the next few years which are going
to change the way that we understand, the way that ideas about the cultural world
are learnt?
Kirsten Campbell-Howes:
Oh, that’s a hard question. I think what I would like to see, especially in arts and
culture, is people engaging more critically with the digital products that are
produced. Why don’t we have a Brian Sewell of apps, for example? I would like to
see mainstream news sources, papers and magazines, talking about apps as a
cultural concept. They sort of ignore it, I think at the moment.
Max Whitby:
There are some really good writers, I think, here and in the US writing about apps.
I think Stuart Dredge is really insightful, I think ‘The Verge’ and the ‘Salon’ and
‘Wired’ in the US cover apps in a really interesting way. I think it is becoming part
of our mainstream culture in a way I’m very encouraged by. When we published
‘The Waste Land’ we got an editorial in the ‘New York Times’, which completely
astonished us. I think it’s a good indication that this is a form that is being taken
seriously, part of our mainstream culture.
John Wilson:
I suppose, Dave Patten at the Science Museum, what Kirsten’s saying there is you
can’t second-guess the technology because really – because it is evolving so
quickly, and in radical new ways the whole time. You’ve just got to adapt to it as it
comes along.
Dave Patten:
You can kind of see the evolutionary thing, what you can’t predict is revolutions in
technology. But I think there are some big things on the horizon that are going to
make a huge difference. There’s Google Glass and the various products around
that which are augmented reality systems, which potentially mean you have the
entire knowledge of the human race at your fingertips all the time. I think there are
probably some quite big shifts around education that need to cope with that.
That’s less about teaching people facts and more about where do you go to find
your information; how do you validate your sources of information; how do you be
critical of information? We might need to change the way we’re thinking about
things. They are products that are probably three or four years away from coming
to market.
Max Whitby:
I think one thing that’s certain in the future is that textbooks are a dead industry.
Big printed textbooks. The whole of the publishing industry in that academic sector
I think is in a state of considerable disarray and turmoil trying to work out what
comes next, and how they can make money. One of the interesting things
technology often does is it, to use another terrible world, disintermediates
organisations. In other words we don’t need publishers anymore. A lot of teachers
and academics in universities can directly produce material for students to
consume. That’s a really exciting thing.
John Wilson:
Well, there’s a lot to think about there. We’d like to hear from you on the subjects
raised in this programme. Please do tweet us using the hash tag #ArtsDigital.
Many thanks to my guests in the studio today, Max Whitby, Dave Patten and
Kirsten Campbell-Howes.
Voiceover:
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