ITTE '01 Swansea

Janete Sander Costa - Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, jtscosta@uol.com.br

Eileen Freeman - Trinity College Dublin, eileen.freeman@cs.tcd.ie

Malcolm Hughes – University of the West of England, Bristol. UK  Malcolm.Hughes@uwe.ac.uk

Chris Jones - Sunderland University, chris.jones@sunderland.ac.uk>

Richard Millwood - ULTRALAB, Anglia Polytechnic University,   richard@ultralab.anglia.ac.uk [MAIN CONTACT FOR PROPOSAL]

Terry Taylor – Artist, terry.taylor101@virgin.net

Roberta K. Weber – Florida Atlantic University, Jupiter, Florida, USA edutech@gate.net

Life long learning with ICT / EduTech - a reflective and affective activity

Participants will reflect on their individual learning path with ICT / EduTech and teacher education by creating a personal film using iMovie, selecting, creating and incorporating images and sounds from the last twenty years of ITTE and educational computing.  The workshop hopes to demonstrate the importance of affect in learning with digital tools and proposes a model which may be adapted for use with student teachers, inservice teachers and lecturers in Initial Teacher Training as well as others involved in the development of ICT capability in the education world. The workshop will also afford an opportunity to become familiar with film making with digital tools.

ICT / EduTech developments over the past twenty years have been rapid, leading to formalisation and embedding into the school and teacher education curricula as the importance of digital tools in industry, commerce and civil society has been recognised. These curricula, and many of the practices which have developed to teach them, focus on knowledge and skills. It is rare to find a connection with affective aspects, indeed often a love for computers is associated with obsession and technocentric behaviour.   But many of the reports of learners' work with computers shows that their spirit is moved by their relationship with digital tools and that they experience empowerment which changes their relationship with learning. Turkle (1997) reports on a move away from calculation and rules to the promotion of "simulation, navigation, and interaction". Such powerful effects are not simply knowledge and skills.  Most importantly, many colleagues in teacher education around the world have little or no experience of pleasure or aesthetic satisfaction with computers - this has to change or they cannot fully engage in discussion with their students about the learning that may be inspired by the use of digital tools and media. "Computers offer themselves as models of mind and as 'objects to think with'." (Turkle 1999)

Participants will make a video, using iMovie, from still images from the UK National Archive of Educational Computing. The still images will span the twenty years since microcomputers were introduced into classrooms in numbers. Also available will be music of the period(s) and sound samples from some of the programs. The aim is to pick images and sounds significant in the participants career or personal development and to annotate with subtitles why they were significant, thus telling the story of their engagement with ICT / EduTech. Participants will also be able to film further footage, create their own artwork or sounds and use these as source material. The final products will be shared and discussed in the workshop, participants will evaluate the affective effect on developing competence with the digital tools, media and learning and then put the results on display to the whole conference if they feel safe to do so(!).

A suite of 8 iMacs or iBooks should allow 16 participants to work in pairs. A projector with decent loudspeakers connected to the workshop leader's notebook should allow presentation of the results. Apple will be approached to support the workshop. [The resources may also form an internet café for the remainder of the conference, as in Cheltenham]

Kolb, D.(1984) Experiential Learning. Prentice Hall ISBN: 0132952610

Turkle, S.(1997) Seeing Through Computers. Education in a Culture of Simulation. Volume 8, Issue 31. March 1 - April 1 1997 Available at: http://www.prospect.org/print/V8/31/turkle-s.html

Turkle, S. (1999) "What Are We Thinking About When We Are Thinking About Computers?" In The Science Studies Reader, Mario Biagioli (ed.). New York: Routledge, 1999. Available at: http://web.mit.edu/sturkle/www/routledge_reader.html

and the paper proposal:

Richard Millwood - ULTRALAB, Anglia Polytechnic University,   richard@ultralab.anglia.ac.uk [MAIN CONTACT FOR PROPOSAL]

Stephen Heppell - ULTRALAB, Anglia Polytechnic University

ULTRALAB 2001 - upsizing over fifteen years

ULTRALAB has grown from a small team of three to an enterprise employing over fifty full time personnel, from a wooden hut in the fields of Essex to a central part of Anglia Polytechnic University, from experimental multimedia to worldwide leader in ICT, from 1987 to 2001.

This paper reviews milestone, projects past and present, and maps their design, development and outcomes in a family tree in an attempt to  explain this phenomenon.  ULTRALAB's core values have helped to maintain coherence in an ambitious programme of applied research which has always attempted to make educational change happen against a backdrop of regularly advancing technological innovation, educational and social movement.  The challenge of creating large-scale projects such as Tesco SchoolNet 2000 (involving 17,000 schools) and Talking Heads (involving all headteachers in the UK and aspiring headteachers) has been seductive but hasn't prevented ULTRALAB embarking on relatively small-scale, but ambitious projects such as Etui (to invent a new toy for 4-8 year olds) and Notschool.net (to bring children that school didn't fit back to learning ).  In every case the emphasis is on action research in an ethnographic tradition, with a strong moral emphasis that learners are constructive and should be participants. Emerging mantras from all ULTRALAB's work include "content isn't king but community is sovereign" and "affective is effective".

http://www.ultralab.ac.uk