Abstract
The paper discusses the uses of multimedia in a number of schools, centring
on one project - the 'Ecademy'. We have used this project as a predicate
for gaining access to and understanding the uses of multimedia technologies
in schools. The paper argues that we can see a clear division between provision
of equipment and content that has, in some cases, led users to generate
their own content and to use the technology in potentially unanticipated
ways.
Keywords: education, multimedia, technology in schools, internet learning,
social learning
NOTE: An earlier version of this paper was presented
at the SLIM meeting preceding the COST A4 workshop in July of 1997. Since
that time there have been a number of significant changes, and we hope to
reflect some of these within what follows. -RS
The paper describes the 'Ecademy' project that is ongoing within schools
in the City of Edinburgh and West Lothian Region. The Ecademy is a cable
based internet service aimed at schools. Each school has a web page on the
server and access to a number of common resources such as web authoring
tools, FTP and, more importantly, worksheets ('content'). The schools gain
access to the services provided with a cable modem, supplied by the cable
company.
Within the framework of an ethnographic study of the use and adoption
of the system within schools, we show how the provision of technology and
content were treated as discrete entities by the participants, leading them
to innovate using the technology and to largely abandon the provided content.
Our aim here is to supply a 'natural history' of the project, examining
modes of engagement with technology and content that we have found among
teachers in our study. The paper can be read as a series of 'tales' that
seek to orient the reader to the dynamics of the situation from various
viewpoints, enabling an explication of the dimensions of social learning
that have taken place both within schools and wider fora.
Background
The Ecademy has its roots in the requirement of Linlithgow Academy,
a school in West Lothian (just outside the City of Edinburgh) to be connected
to the SuperJANET network by way of the University of Edinburgh. Linlithgow
Academy is situated in an area that has a high concentration of IT manufacturing
companies - some of which were keen to donate equipment to local schools.
In the case of Linlithgow Academy, Sun Microsystems donated a workstation
and some training at Strathclyde University to the school. The equipment
and training enabled D., the principal teacher of computing to secure the
place of computing technology as central to the operation of the school.
D. then established a school web page and the beginnings of a school intranet.
The support that Sun Microsystems provided to the school was initially very
comprehensive, but D. perceived a change in attitude over time:
'It's really just been that they were there in the first year or so, and you could call and say "can I speak to (name)?" and they would be there and tell you how to do things, in layman's terms. Well, that I mean people are busy I know that, but that went down so that I phoned them, emailed them and even sent them letters but never got any reply, so I don't know about the support any more. I think we do things by ourselves now'.
(Interview June 1997).
As we shall see below, this change in attitude appears to be a common
theme within the Ecademy project.
In the first months of 1995 Telewest, the company originally canvassed
to undertake the connection from Linlithgow to SuperJANET concluded that
they could not donate the connection to the school, and offered an alternative
arrangement. SM, technology manager at Telewest describes the early developments
around what was to become the Ecademy:
'. . . we spoke to the school and said, "look private circuits are our bread and butter and we wouldn't feel very comfortable about giving you this connection free of charge. But how would you like (. . .), to get involved with us with this new technology brought by modem?" They said, yes they would be interested doing that. So the upshot was that we eventually got delivery, that was in sort of March/April '95 working it was December.
(S)o we gave the school the (connection) they chuntered
along quite happily for about 6 months before anything else began to happen.
(Interview 28 August 1997 modified)
The project was initiated by the school as opposed to the cable company.
However, the service that the school wanted was only obtained through participation
in the trial of cable modems initiated by Telewest. At this time, the connection
between the school and Super JANET was the only one of its type; until other
schools began to ask about the service.
Before discussing the establishment of the Ecademy as a service, it is
important to outline some of the developments within Telewest that affected
the place of network services within their overall strategy. First, the
growth of publicity about the internet around the time that the connection
was established meant that it was difficult for any person not to know at
least something about the internet. Of course, schools at this time had
become more IT aware, assisted in part by government policy, and thus teachers
were perhaps even more aware than others of the potential within the internet.
This awareness had an impact on Telewest in that they began to implement
a co-ordinated national strategy for network communications. The internet
was taken up as an area for development within Telewest, leading to the
establishment of a multimedia group which established and trialled a cable
internet service in mid-1996.
One of the teachers involved in the original trial notes that the high
cost of purchasing a connection to Heriot-Watt University and SuperJANET
was prohibitively expensive:
'It was a thousand pounds a year for the connection
to Super JANET and then another four hundred on top of that for their services.
Now, I'm not saying, but their services, what, it was just a server sitting
on a shelf in an office (laughs), you know. So that's when we got hooked
up with Telewest'.
(Interview, June 1997)
SM notes that during the time that the company had initiated their strategy,
other factors outwith the purview of the project had an impact on it. The
main development which SM identifies is the re-organisation of local government.
This took place as a result of national government policy, whose avowed
aim was to 'rationalise' structures of local administration - so that there
would be a single tier responsible for all local government activities.
This was important for Telewest in that they aimed to provide network services
to the newly established local government bodies, and saw their work in
networking schools as a way of flagging their interest in and capability
to provide similar services to local government. SM describes this as follows:
'This being '96 there were a few other things on the horizon, one of which was the imminent reorganisation of local government, so the last, the dying months of the Lothian Region, you know, we were talking to various people in Lothian Region about education because it was under their remit and what we decided was that we would develop a trial that could maybe act as model for delivering this service on a wider basis. With the reorganisation of local government we saw an opportunity to provide an administrative network as well. Although the word internet had started to be bandied around we didn't really think of it in those terms because it wasn't a true internet in that it was just but essentially is that it adds up to an internet (. . .) so we started to think in terms of providing administrative network, or promoting this as an option to use it as administrative network and we started to think about adding some value to the internet experience because again it's one of these things, I suppose because the internet has really kind of come to the fore all in the past 3 or 4 years'
(Interview 28 August 1997 modified. My italics.)
The service was not in itself a marketing strategy ab origine
- but became so as a result of two trends: first, the interest of other
schools in the connection; and second the recognition by Telewest that the
internet was a growth area. These two trends seem to have run parallel or
to have elaborated each other, leading to the establishment of the Ecademy
as a part of Telewest's strategy.
Origins of the Ecademy
Having given a broad background to the development of the Ecademy, I
should like to discuss the development of the service in more detail.
SM describes the development of the service thus:
'. . . (W)e were looking at ways of adding value and
one of the things that we decided to do was to engage SCET (the Scottish
Council for Educational Technology) to develop a website for the Ecademy
and to create, or to bring together, a suite of tools that would allow teachers
to create curriculum materials and homework exercises and so forth and put
them on-line, so SCET got involved in that. We invited all the schools we
wanted to try out the service with and SCET invited another couple, so a
total of 7 schools (were involved). While SCET were developing the website
and, and working out what should be included in the suite of tools, I was
working on the, some strategy for marketing the service to schools'.
As can be seen above, once it was established that there was a user constituency
for the project, some schools invited by Telewest and others by SCET. Telewest
initiated further work on the Ecademy, contracting SCET to write a corpus
of web-based worksheets for the schools to use.
From a request by one school for connection to SuperJANET, through trials
of a cable modem, the service had developed into a project involving seven
schools. In addition to this, the network was regarded by Telewest as a
proving ground for their network systems - forming a central component of
their marketing strategy to local government in a bid to provide network
connection across the council.
Having established the system as viable, on a number of levels, we can
move on to examine the evolution and structure of the Ecademy web provision.
SCET involved Professor Steven Hepple from Anglia Polytechnic in the
early stages of the project. His concern, as seen by one teacher, was to
address the architecture of the web pages, so as to make them accessible
to the users, who were on the whole neophytes. According to one teacher,
Hepple's original design conceptualised the Ecademy in the following manner:
'You go in and there's all the departments and the teachers and the staff room, and if you want to go into, lets say, geography, then you click on that and you're in and you can get into the teacher's materials in the filing cabinet by clicking. So it was a very nice idea, and it seemed to work well in principle. Now the thing was that we didn't see him again, and we were left very much to get on with it by ourselves and with [the cable company]. So we developed the system in concert with SCET and got things to the state you see them now, but then things started to fall by the wayside a bit'.
(Interview, June 1997. My italics).
Key
Figure Two - Communication in Ecademy
| Proposed E-cademy | Pre E-cademy | Intermediate, configuration and use | |
| Technology | Broadband Cable Modem Internet Connection via local E-cademy server ( run by Education dept ). Local server storing educational material created by teachers, outside organisations (commerical, SCET, Edinburgh University), copies of education WWW sites. | All schools with computers, some connected to a local network, some with local server and Intranet system. | All schools connected to Internet via local server, broadband modem and E-cademy gateway. All have access to E-cademy server, software for uploading and viewing matierals |
| Use of Technology | Internet connection to local network, teachers and students accessing the Internet for e-mail, conferenceing, WWW with local schools and outside. Teachers and students using educational material created by teachers, outside organisations (commerical, SCET, Edinburgh University), copies of education WWW sites. | Schools using computers in different ways. Some teachers downloading Internet material, few experiments with Internet facilities. Some teachers using bullitin boards such as Craignet. Teachers using internat e-mail in schools with LANs. | Teachers and students using Internet connections in certain IT classes and for casual browsing, e-mail. Very little use of the E-cademy server to acces or stor matierals. Worksheets and WWW pages kept on LAN server for easy access. Uploading difficult |
| Communication between schools | Teachers communicating and sharing worksheets, WWW links etc through the local E-cademy Server | Little, if any sharing of worksheets. Teachers in subject areas meet 4 times/year with those from other schools. Subject head teachers meet more frequently. Some teachers communicating via Internet and bulletin boards | Very little change on pre-existing inter-school communication |
| Cable provider Business | Full telecoms services to schools across franchise area and country, especially Broadband Internet connection to schools | Providing some School Internet connections through dial up or Cable modem. Bidding for larger telecoms provison to school and Education Services | Roll out of a national programme of e-cademy with different levels of Internet provision up to broadband |
There are a number of different constituencies that the system has been
required to address (see figure one). Taking the City Council, for example,
one finds that the Ecademy was articulated as a demonstration of a concept,
namely the possibility of a distributed network communications system. Obviously,
the system was shown in operation in schools and sold as a system to connect
schools - in that sense it is cognate with the articulation available to
schools - but it was also part of Telewest's marketing strategy.
Further, if we refer to the web page, it is notable that there are a
number of different constituencies addressed within the one area: parents,
students, teachers and so on. Each is apparently open to all other groups
- there are no passwords required, for example. Just as teachers can access
the web to place worksheets onto the site, so parents can access sites dealing
with their child's school (all the schools in the project have web sites,
of varying quality), and students can access the system to work on assignments
and to do homework.
Among some teachers we spoke with there was a feeling of cynicism regarding
the ways in which the system had been 'sold'- that is, the perception was
that it was more a marketing ploy aimed at getting parents to invest in
cable as opposed to a pedagogic tool. As one teacher said:
'I think that [company] when they sell cable, are
well aware that they can sell it to the lower C's and people who watch a
lot of television, that's the easy part. The problem is the B's and A's,
and that's where the homework thing comes in - it's a money making thing'
In short, the system was sold to domestic customers as another reason
for having cable in the home, as a part of a marketing strategy. Teachers
felt that this conflicted with their understanding of what the system should
be. Coupled with their perception that there was no attempt to provide the
kinds of support promised for the schools, this led to a degree of cynicism.
From the teacher's viewpoint, one might say that as the perceived marketing
strategy within the cable company moved on the need to sell the educational
benefits of the system to consumers qua parents were dropped - leaving
the Ecademy to fend for itself.
Of course, the parents were only one group of customers within the system
and thus within the cable company's marketing strategy. The local council
too were a part of the system - engaging in it with a view to placing the
system within all the schools in the city. However, their contribution was
at a level of tacit acknowledgement and acceptance of the system as an experiment,
without commitment to funding or purchase. The cable company was also involved
in tendering for other network provision within the council, and one might
regard the Ecademy as a 'value added' component of this bidding process.
The council were certainly more involved in the other side of the case,
the provision of equipment. In one school we visited, over one hundred Power
Macs had been purchased and installed on a network across the school. Investment
in the 'hardware' within the area is significant, and although the school
mentioned above is a somewhat special case, being new and built with networking
capability, it is not untypical. Other, older, schools visited also possessed
a significant number of machines. One teacher in this latter type of school
noted:
'we have a computer in most classrooms - most people
when they get here and see this set-up, they just drool. All this [the computers]
means that teachers can use them within the framework of lessons in the
classroom'
On a more cynical level, we were told by one informant that the schools
had received the equipment, and were pleased to have it, but that there
was little or no money to be spent on training the teachers how to use it.
The informant said that while there was a lot of equipment ('we
were showered with the machines') there was very little training,
and that this was because:
'there are very few photo opportunities in giving
out training, you can't show people coming in and shaking hands and handing
over training like you can machines'
Thus it was up to the principal teachers in computing to teach their
colleagues how to use the system, and how to come to terms with the implications
of the web for the activity of doing teaching. Time as we are all doubtless
aware, is something that educators have very little of - and since there
were no funds for teachers to attend training sessions it fell mainly to
computing teachers to show their colleagues how to do the basics, and to
leave them to work through problems themselves or in groups after that.
Teachers had to be shown how to use both web publishing tools and, more
importantly, email. A teacher in the school that was built with network
capacity commented:
'We said, "we'll show you the system and how
to use it, not attachments and preferences and all that, just the basics,
and then you can go on and play with it yourselves", and honestly,
within minutes there were hundreds of messages on the server, now some of
them were total rubbish, but they were there and people were using the system,
that's the main thing. Now, well, we couldn't live without it.
We should flag here that this is one (informal) mode of social learning
that is key within the adoption of the system within the schools.
To conclude this section, we can see that there are multiple actors within
the system - each having their own purposes and means of achieving these.
Some of the aims and methods overlap, but others do not - leaving what we
might think of as a residue of incommensurate aims to be dealt with, in
many cases by the teachers.
As noted in the introduction, our main research has been undertaken in
the schools, and it is here that we can see both the growth of problems
with the system and the emergence of solutions as a process of social learning.
Having all the equipment and network connections together with the content
of the Ecademy was part of an ongoing project. The aim of the Ecademy was
to provide a basis for collaboration within and between schools, notably
at the level of circulating worksheets via the web. However, the majority
of our respondents regarded the materials provided on the web as poor and
not suited to the work which they were doing with students. It should be
noted that while the worksheets were notionally generated by SCET, a number
were written by employees of the cable company.
Teachers were expected to cooperate in the production of worksheets for
placement on the web. In the majority of cases, this did not occur. Among
reasons cited were: demands on time, differences in syllabus between schools
and the apparent inability of teachers to communicate with each other on
this topic. Here we should note the existence of a number of fora for communication
between schools on the subject of the Ecademy. However, it is important
to note that these meetings were by and large attended by senior staff in
the schools, often at head or deputy head level, and not by the teachers
using the system. We might formulate this problem by saying that the meetings
that did exist were used for the management of the system as an experiment
and not as a forum for the exchange of ideas among teachers. An example
of this is found in the comments made by one computing teacher to the effect
that it was rare to be invited along to the meetings by senior staff, and
rarer still to see other teachers of equivalent status there also!
In sum we are left with a system that has a more or less static content,
and little if any communication between teachers below senior management
level. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that the system became the focus
of innovation initiated by individual teachers, usually in isolation. It
is to this that we now turn.
The majority of teachers that we spoke to have now come to regard the
Ecademy as something which exists apart from their own work; something which
there is no need to consult when planning courses, lectures and the like.
The majority of these schools have evolved their own intranets - taking
materials from the web and placing them onto local servers for use within
departments. Other schools maintain lists of URL's which are accessible
by students either in class or in their own time - usually in the school
library. Yet it must be said that the majority of teachers still do not
use the system at all, save for email and the like.
The Ecademy appears to be regarded as problematic by a number of the
teachers that we spoke with. It has been under utilised by the majority
of its user constituency. Those who do use it have tended to employ the
equipment, i.e. the cable modems, to generate their own web based teaching
resources for their schools as opposed to using the Ecademy to share these
among schools. In short, the conceptual framework of the Ecademy (i.e. web
based teaching materials) is used as opposed to the system as a whole.
The potential of the system as it was originally envisaged has led some teachers, usually those who teach computing, to become entrepreneurs or evangelists - showing colleagues how materials from the web can be included in their lessons and worksheets, collecting lists of URL's and downloading them, suggesting multimedia for the library and so on. These teachers are not necessarily those who attend meetings, as has previously been noted, but they are in the 'front line' insofar as it is to them that their colleagues turn for advice and for resources.
These innovative teachers have become the focus of informal social learning
about the use of web technologies in the schools - with no extra time or
funding. During visits to the schools, the researchers were present when
members of staff arrived to discuss potential sites and applications as
well as problems. This innovation has been extended within the majority
of schools which employ other, more basic, network resources such as email
within their own systems. In this section of the report it is perhaps useful
to comment on the use of these 'banal' technologies as modes of social learning.
'When the server went down a few weeks ago, pretty
soon people were knocking on my door saying, the email's down, what do we
do. I said "I know I'm trying to fix it", and they were really
stuck, y'know how do we communicate. So I was like well, "think back
to how you did it before, you sent a bairn (child) round to all the classrooms
with a note". "Oh yes" they said, but really we couldn't
work now without it. I, well there's some things that are on mail that you
wouldn't say to people's faces, and I say to them (holds hand out as if
reading) you would no say this to their faces would you, but what's different
about email, and it's a real part of how we work now'
From the quote above, it is obvious that email has become a central communicative
resource for teachers within the system. Within the schools that we visited,
email has become the main mode of communication between departments. In
one school, a new senior teacher contrasted the predominance of face-to-face
communication in his previous school to the use of email. This is not to
say that the school had become anomic because of the use of email - that
people did not speak, they certainly did. Rather, it is to draw attention
to the ways that new methods of communication are integrated into the practices
of the school, and the ways that these can be used as media for social learning.
Email as a communicative medium did not present significant barriers
to use. In particular, unlike the Ecademy system, it did not presume any
significant change in the pedagogic practice of teachers within the schools.
The email system allowed teachers to swap site recommendations and to discuss
improvements to the system with colleagues. It also enabled the development
of a more informal communicative culture within the school. Within the private
environment afforded by email, teachers could talk about topics that had
previously been difficult to discuss, such as morale, social events and
the like.
The Ecademy might be seen as having some major questions over it regarding
use and utility. Ecademy provided the information infrastructure, but its
success would have depended on a change in the practices of teachers - in
particular in making their teaching documents visible to other schools on
the system. there was no incentive system or collective culture (either
established or emergent) established to motivate such a shift. Though teachers
did not invest in the Ecademy in the way planned, they did how the technological
infrastructure supplied could be adapted to their purposes - for example
as a means of access to web-based teaching aids.
We spoke above of the learning of independence: given the presence of
the technology, in the majority of schools some other way was found to achieve
some of the aims of the Ecademy. As we have said, this was achieved at a
local level - each school adopting its own solution with the technology
available. In all this, they retained the idea that the web was a unique
pedagogic tool - it was just the manner of use that changed. The majority
of learning was based around the computing staff - they became a focus (albeit
an informal one) when the envisaged use of the Ecademy failed to materialise
and sought solutions to areas that the Ecademy did not address.
Roger S. Slack, 11/03/97.
