Seminar 1: Identifying the issues

23 October 2003, London

A small-scale event which identified and scoped the issues from a number of perspectives.

Outcomes

Dr Lydia Plowman, University of Stirling

Each of the four discussion groups included representatives from different sectors of education, government, media and industry.

Identifying the barriers

The morning session focused on barriers to integrating research into the design process.

Participants agreed that we need to recognise that there is not necessarily a shared understanding of the purpose of ICT within education and there is confusion over its status with reference to traditional curriculum models and subject disciplines. There was general agreement from presenters and the breakout groups that research has a role in informing the design process, whether this is in terms of the user's experience and satisfaction or their technological know-how. For industry, research could be a means to cost avoidance if it saves unnecessary duplication or can provide background information. It can also be used as a marketing tool.

A key barrier was perceived to be the lack of industry awareness about educational research, particularly research on learning which pre-dated any research on ICT in education. Research that looks at how children learn best without ICT could be valuable as it might enable software to be designed which did not aim to replace successful teaching methods but which would, instead, focus on areas that were widely perceived to be difficult to teach.

A lack of communication between researchers and industry was identified as a barrier. This can be a matter of different language and terms being used to describe areas in which both groups have an interest, such as design for learning, but it also encompasses problems of making academic research accessible and jargon-free. Inadequate understanding of the commonalities of roles, problems and areas of interests across the sectors has exacerbated this problem.

It is difficult for designers to communicate with teachers and involve them in the design process because it is so difficult for teachers to get time out of school. There is a need to involve young people in the design and testing of materials while they are being produced.

Different timescales can be a barrier to productive collaboration. Commercial companies funded by venture capital work to different rhythms and schedules than the education sector. An iterative design process that is informed by user studies can be very time-consuming. There is a need for long-term research and development as well as the capability to adapt to rapid changes in technology and society.

Research is often conducted in the field and then reported retrospectively. More focus on scenario development across different sectors would enable collaborative development of foresight. There is currently a tension between research that benefits from hindsight and the foresight required by industry.

There is a lack of funding to encourage collaboration across the design and education sectors. The funding structures are also a barrier and there may be a case to use a model such as the cross-cutting and interdisciplinary programs funded by the National Science Foundation in the US. The Information Technology Research program, for instance, operates at the frontiers of IT research and education and encourages interdisciplinary collaboration. Sivasegaram Manimaaran from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) informed us of a forthcoming research council initiative on Realising the Potential of eLearning which should address some of these issues and encourage interdisciplinarity and cross-sector research and development.

The curriculum is not currently flexible enough for innovative uses of technology and forms of assessment also create difficulty. A portfolio-based assessment would help to create a more flexible curriculum and enable greater status to be given to ICT, creativity, games and role-play in learning.

The following topics were identified as areas in which research is needed:

1. The roles of parents and home in children's education and producing a greater understanding of the environment influencing children and young people which is not based on urban myths.
2. Barriers to embedding ICT within the curriculum.
3. How the interface could be more fun and easy to use.
4. Examining the ways in which the teacher's role changes in relation to learners when using new technologies.
5. The extent to which school management influences the take-up of ICT and what school leadership factors make a difference.
6. Assessment and learning models for collaborative work facilitated by new technologies.

Making recommendations

The afternoon breakout groups focused on the need for dissemination and communication as key recommendations. There was a consensus that research findings should be available in a variety of forms that suited the needs of different interest groups and that there should be formats which spoke directly to teachers, case studies which could be used by industry and press releases to make research accessible to the media.

The main recommendations to emerge were:

• devise a strategy for providing more meta-reviews of research (like the recent Futurelab series) that are accessible to all stakeholders
• develop a series of placements of PhD students who could move between the worlds of university research and industry. These introductions could be brokered by Futurelab
• develop a series of short-term fellowships for people based in policy, industry or universities to initiate projects that can be developed across the sectors. This could also be adapted for teachers so that they could become more involved in research and development
• develop more high profile events and projects to encourage collaboration between users and designers, such as the Design Challenge taking place at the BETT show in January 2004
• Research Councils such as ESRC and EPSRC should ensure that projects concerned with software or content development should be based on researchers collaborating with industry, teachers, children and, where applicable, policy makers
• Research Councils and other funders should provide more incentives, and models, for how research could be disseminated.

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