What Happens Next?

1

• What Happens Next?
• Looking towards a future e-learning landscape
• Keri Facer
• Research Director, NESTA Futurelab
• www.nestafuturelab.org
• 16.11.05

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About Futurelab

• Est. 2001 to bring together creative, education,
  technology and research communities to create
  future learning environments
• RD programme - prototypes
• Research programme - evidence
• Events - communities
• Publications sharing lessons learnt. See
• http//www.nestafuturelab.org/research/lit_reviews
  .htm

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Blurring the Boundaries
Formal
School
Broadcast TV
Virtual
Real
Cultural Sector
Internet
Informal
From Hawkey, 2004
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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

5
Projects Mudlarking

• Collaboration between Goldsmiths College,
  Futurelab Mobile Bristol
• Working to create interactive learning
  landscape overlaying the real world

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Key Principles for developing resources for a
connected learning landscape

• Understand learners
• Understand the potential of new technologies

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Understanding Learners

• Principle 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

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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

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Emerging Worlds

• MMORPGs

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Alternative Worlds

• SecondLife

Travel 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 broomsticksor 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
serviceand officially designate your Second Life
partner
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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

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• Find out more www.nestafuturelab.org
• Contact Keri.Facer_at_nestafuturela
  b.org
• Key areas of work
• Learning in schools, homes, cultural
  institutions, media
• Computer games
• Disappearing intelligent computers
• Mobile learning
• Children as researchers