Resources

An interview with John Davies, Learning Futures Adviser, Dudley Grid for Learning

Kim Thomas

You can't accuse Dudley of taking a half-hearted approach to the adoption of technology in its schools. Since signing a private finance initiative (PFI) with educational technology supplier RM in 1999, it has rolled out a hugely ambitious ICT programme that has included handing out PDAs to every schoolchild in the borough.

Its latest project is the Aquabrowser, an internet search engine specifically tailored to the needs of education. Originally developed by Medialab to help large companies manage their documentation and internal communications, the Aquabrowser was later extended to be used by national libraries to catalogue their books and resources.

Tailoring it to the needs of schools was, therefore, a weighty project. But why do it at all when Google is at everyone's fingertips? "We don't think that Google and Yahoo and the other search engines are appropriate for education," says John Davies, Learning Futures Adviser at Dudley Grid for Learning (DGfL). John regularly talks to children in schools across the authority to solicit their views on the DGfL: "One of the things they say is that they're fed up of going to the internet, especially in school time. It might be their only visit to the ICT room is an internet activity, finding some information and they spend all lesson trawling the internet, finding nothing, learning nothing except that there's a load of rubbish on the internet."

If you enter the word 'pyramids' into Google, he points out, you'll get five million hits, and even if you refine it down to about 7,000, you're still unlikely to find the site you're looking for. The Aquabrowser addresses that by finding only sources that are relevant.

The first incarnation of the Aquabrowser is called Live2Learn and has been running for 12 months. It is tailored for use with The Learning Journey, Dudley's web-based programme that challenges children to use their problem-solving skills collaboratively to complete a virtual journey. If you enter the word 'pyramids' into the Live2Learn search bar, you see 92 results. These results are all sites that have been carefully selected by educationalists as appropriate content for schoolchildren. If you click on a result, a separate window will open showing a preview of the site. Most of the time, the information you need will be in the preview, but you can also click a 'Go to' button that takes you to the site itself. (If the site disappears from the web, the preview page remains.)

That's not all, however. To the left of the results list is a list of key words related to the subject: in this case, words such as mummy, pharaoh, cheops. This is known as a 'thinking cloud', and students can click on any one of these words to refine their search further.

To the right of the results list are three headings: Accessibility, Content and Subject. These enable students to personalise their search. Accessibility enables them to specify whether they want to see sites that are easy, moderate or hard; Content lets them choose the type of content they're looking for (such as encyclopaedia or biography); while Subject gives them the opportunity to specify a particular aspect of the topic, such as medicine or beliefs. "They match the resource exactly to their requirements, to their ability, their level of maturity and preferred media type," says John. "We know that where kids would usually use Google, when they're introduced to the Aquabrowser they don't go back." Statistics on usage, he says, show that Live2Learn is used as much in the evenings and weekends as it is during schooltime.

Another version of Aquabrowser, the Internet Channel for Education (ICE), will be available in January. ICE is a much bigger site (it will reference 100,000 websites) that will come in different flavours: N-ICE for primary schools, ICE3 for secondary schools, covering the whole curriculum, and Chill, which is the students' own version of Aquabrowser, where they choose the sites that they value the most. It will be freely available to schools everywhere, not just to Dudley students.

The development of the Aquabrowser search engines reflects Dudley's commitment to creating an educational environment in which students can take charge of their own learning. It follows in the footsteps of the Learning Journey, an educational tool that has now been used in schools all over the world. The Learning Journey started life as the Dudley Challenge in 1999, and was developed (with some involvement from Futurelab) to take advantage of all the technology Dudley schools acquired at that time.

Aimed mainly at pupils at the top end of KS2 and the lower end of KS3, the idea is that children group into teams and make a round-the-world journey in a virtual hot air balloon. There are 12 missions, each ending in a different country. The missions include a number of set tasks that require problem-solving skills: they are almost impossible for an individual child (or even adult) to complete, so the children have to work collaboratively. The content of the missions is linked to the National Curriculum, and each mission can take up to a term to complete.

The journey teaches children a variety of skills, John says. Some of the tasks are web-based, some based in the real world. The children are required to use initiative in finding out information - every child has an e-mail account, so this includes e-mailing experts, such as archaeologists, musicians and artists, to ask them questions. Each time the balloon 'touches down' in a location, the children find out about that location's culture, tradition and history.

John believes that the Learning Journey is helping children develop the competencies they need for the future. Dudley has carried out research asking multinational companies what skills they required from the workforce: "They were talking about things like the ability to solve problems, to show initiative and be independent, to take responsibility for decisions but also to do it collaboratively, as part of a team. They wanted people who were resilient, people who were creative," says John. These are all qualities, he adds, that "the present curriculum doesn't recognise, reward or celebrate." The Learning Journey, on the other hand, is all about showing initiative and working collaboratively.

The real achievement of the Learning Journey, says John, is that it enables children to become better learners: the student starts as an emergent learner, and goes through different stages: to competent learner, to confident learner, to expert and master learner. If, as John argues, the current curriculum is largely based on a Victorian model of learning, then the Learning Journey is perhaps a model ideally suited to the needs of the 21st century.