 Llywedd Rem kingdom Calling everyone else sorry. I should practice g'widei Now I don't I can ever say that seriously I mean that I've just talked to some of the Australians later and and they can teach me how separate properly without laughing I Given the This task and it's quite a daunting task of opening the conference and Tryn to cover the themes of the conference I thought, how can I cover those themes? I thought, well, I'm going to talk about chasms. I'm very aware that we're doing a lot of tinkering around the edges. I know that the people in this room today are some of the pioneers who are doing that tinkering. But we need to do more. There are some really nice initiatives which are taking giant leaps. Sometimes they need them. David Lloyd George said, don't be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated. You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps. I'm also going to talk about monkeys. You'll find more about that later. Let me just explain how my talk is going to pan out. I'm going to talk about the chasms I see existing in all sorts of areas of education. I'm going to talk about some of the solutions that people have come up with and others that people are going to come up with and how they can really jump across those big chasms that are opening up in all facets of education. Then one or two caveats at the end, because I think there are some things we need to do first before we can start to take these giant leaps. I'm going to talk about informal and formal learning. I'm going to talk about schools and higher education. I'm going to talk about cultures and economies. As Mike said, I had a background as a school teacher. I was in teacher training in higher education. Now I've gone into industry. I hadn't actually thought about that, Mike, but I hadn't realised that I've jumped a few chasms myself. I actually don't call myself a corporate backpacker, an escaped academic usually. If anyone wants to know this scape route, come and see me afterwards. There may be some other chasms I'll come across as we go through a particularly between higher education and training in industry. I'll start with the informal and formal learning. I think there are a lot of differences. We've just had Alan Dodson talking about the generation who are the digital natives and we're the digital immigrants. We know a lot about that. We know that there's a lot of tools that we learn with that our children don't and the younger people don't use. My son tells me I use a computer like an old person. I actually think I'm quite good at computers, but it's just the way they use the tools is actually quite different. The way we learn is different and with whom we learn. We had a very interesting session yesterday at the workshop at LSRI about learning spaces and we talked about moving away from age-related classes. It's one of the things I've been talking about for a long while that we really need to think about that. If you look at the way kids play games, they don't know how old the people are. They're playing games with them when they're playing multi-user games. They have no idea how old they are, but they don't care. If they're playing the game and they're getting some interaction and it's working and they feel they have the competition, why does age matter? This is the sort of child that we all have to teach. They are in their bedrooms, they have the television on, they have the radio on, they have their iPods, they're listening to music, they don't notice the time going. They don't seem to have time to do their homework though they seem to be doing that. It's actually quite interesting because they still do want to sit down with their friends. I was interviewing a 14-year-old a couple of years back and he said he gets home and he has all these instant message windows open and he's chatting to several different friends, all in different windows, several chats going. I said, do you talk about homework? He says, oh yeah, we discuss our homework. I said, oh, you get group homework thinking we've got a real innovation here going on in schools. He said, no, no, we don't have group homework. Oh yes, we do have group homework, but we don't do that on instant messaging. I said, well, how do you do that? Oh, they come round to my house. They do actually like to interact and they do actually see that there are times when they don't want to work with at the computer, through the computer, that they actually want to sit down and work together. So, let's move to the next slide. This is another example that I ripped off YouTube. So it's, and because Microsoft doesn't like real player, I have to do an alt tab to it. So just watch this little clip. Okay, I'm back from a freaking girl. I am socializing hard hard. I'm logged on to an MMORPG with people from all over the world and getting XP with my party using TeamSpeak. I think that sums it up, doesn't it? The difference between the way they learn and the way we learn. But it's interesting because all this social networking that's going on is very interesting. I was listening to, I was actually on the way to give a talk to the specialist schools trust. And I was listening to the specialist schools trust and I was listening to a program on the radio, a news program. And they were saying that children don't know that porridge is made from oats and oats are grown by farmers in fields. So with all this networking, with all this information, it's all this access to information, it isn't being processed into knowledge and there is still a very, very strong role for schools and for teachers and for parents to work with their children to turn that information into knowledge. Wim Veen has written a book called Homer's Appians. I don't know if you've seen it. Recommended it's, you can get it through Amazon with Ben Fracking. And he talks about the fact that if we think back to our own days of learning in school, it was very linear. We stopped in the top left-hand corner and we worked across. The only time we might not have done anything particularly linear is when we looked through an encyclopedia and we were trying to find information. So I think that's a good thing. We looked through an encyclopedia and we were trying to find information. But when you watch young people at the computer, they tend to be very non-linear. They'll start somewhere. They'll flush around. They'll go all over the place to get to the information they want. They scan a screen. They don't start in the top left-hand corner. They're drawn by particular images. They're drawn by text. And they're very much, much more multimedia than we are. It's no longer text is king. These children go to school. And this is what happens. This is an example from the Netherlands. Look at the reduction in the use of media. And this isn't just the internet. It's radio. It's TV. It's magazines. It's newspapers. Cell phones. We know that they're banned in schools and games. So it's those sorts of media. Very, very little media is actually used in school in any format. We're still very much wedded to the printed page with a little bit of content thrown up on the screen that looks very similar a lot of the time. Not all the time. There is some great stuff out there. So we have this issue where the informal learning that students are doing outside school and what they're doing inside school are very, very different. I think universities are getting better, much faster, because they have less of the pressures and I'll come back to that later on when I talk about the differences between the two. John Seely Brown, who is one of my favourite authors, talks a lot about the role of informal learning and we don't really do enough with informal learning inside education. We don't give people the space and the time for it. At Cisco we've really recognised how important that is and we have about 20 different tools that we use, including blogs and wikis and instant messaging, that we allow our staff to use, we encourage them to use and it's really very, very useful because that's the way I find out how to do my job and you can imagine coming in from academia going into industry, I got completely blown away by the TLA's, the three letter acronyms and just learning those sorts of things, learning the culture, learning how you talk to customers, learning what you don't say and what you do say in a business situation. I became the translator really between education and industry, not just the acting at the interface of the technology and education, but actually being the translator between the two and I often get pulled in by our sales team to go and talk to customers because they say oh you talk the same language as them Michelle and I don't leverage and I don't do 360 degree views and all the sorts of, I mean I can swallow the deal but dictionary if I need to with the right customers. What we see is also this stasis, we haven't really grasped it and you look at what happens in education, you see that link with print is still very much there. The VLE approach on the whole is very much about putting that your notes up on the web and I know that I'm talking to a group of people here who don't just do that, who do far more but I'm talking about a lot of the colleagues that you work with and I imagine that 90% of you are trying to bring into the 21st century. We still have lectures when kids demand podcasts so we give them both, why? And we're in the school setting, we're still bogged down with standards and the standards that are set very much in the 20th century if not the 19th. We don't think about what it is we need to do and learn for today's world, for living in today's world and for working in today's world. David McConnell in his book on e-learning groups and communities of practice talks about e-learning courses being linear and you remember I've just shown you how young kids work. They start in the middle and work outwards and they link things in very different ways. It's deterministic, it's closed and we tend to, we don't celebrate success. We only seem to look at telling people how badly they're doing well, how well they're doing and I won't talk about the GCSE results and the A-level results because we get that every year. Okay, so that's the informal formal learning, I've just touched on a few things, there are loads more. Then there's the chasms between school and higher education. I think the US are particularly diverse in that respect. The top ten universities in the world are American. The worst education system is becoming the worst education system. They are falling down and down the league tables in schools is the US. The focus on testing on the SATs is absolutely amazing. I worked in the job I'm just about to leave. I've been working on our corporate social responsibility, our social investments in education and we have a big programme in Mississippi and we've really tried to turn around their view about education. We say, look, those kids will pass the test if you go beyond them and go around them and work in creative ways using their lives, using their technology, giving them access to authentic learning opportunities rather than drilling them all the time, which is what they do. So, there's these big chasms. I see schools almost going backwards in lots of countries and I see higher education beginning to take leaps forward. This is the Technical University at Eindhoven. They run an industrial design course. It's a very interesting course and I think what's happening there shows this real chasm because what's happening is they are recruiting students who come from schools to the university and they've got a very, very high drop out. I think it was around 80% drop out. Why? Because they make the students become employees from day one. They're employees in industrial design and they have projects they work on with local customers. Philips is in the town, so I imagine a lot of those projects come from Philips and the lecturers act as project managers and coordinators and they direct the project. Now, the students just cannot cope with that degree of flexibility, autonomy, the need to collaborate, the need to work in teams, the need to have those critical thinking skills that are so important and they drop out the course, they cannot cope. Obviously, those who do cope and who finish walk into jobs. I think that really to me just shows the differences in the chasm that is growing between schools and universities. Our assessment systems are way out of alignment. Recent announcement in the UK is that school coursework for GCSEs is going to be replaced by controlled assessments because too many parents are helping their kids and so on. Plagiarism and everything else. So they're going to have controlled assessments where the kids will sit and do their coursework in the classroom. Now, we did a survey again a little while ago, two or three years ago, where we talked to children about their use of the internet in school and they said there's no point in using it at school because the security there is so tight, so many sites are banned, I can't actually use it so I wait till I go home and they go home and they get the information they need for their coursework. Now they can't do that. We have these tests at 14, 16 and 18 but they're still very strong focus on writing skills, not on their multimedia skills and there are no group assessment tasks. When we go to universities, I'm still an examiner at Sheffield Hallam University in a very innovative course on e-learning multimedia and consultancy and they have a very varied type of assessment. There are group assessments, peer assessments, e-portfolios which a lot of you are using and the assessment of the way students collaborate online. So you can see how that chasm is really, really broadening. So we talk about lifelong learning but is that really a myth? I mean lifelong learning means something seamless but we get these big jumps, we don't get this continuity and then when students come out of university and go into work we have to retrain them. Our graduate trainees spend a year on a boot camp learning how to work for Cisco. They shouldn't have to do that. They should be able to have a shorter induction course because they know what to do and they can hit the deck running. Then the other thing that's dear to my heart is the cousins between north and south and having worked in so many developing countries having been to so many universities and being absolutely appalled there's one university in Senegal where to get to a lecture that starts at 9 o'clock you have to be there by 6.30 or you won't get in the room because there are 2,000 students to sit into a lecture theatre for 200. They sleep six people to a room for one. So university in the north but we bring people to the UK to the US to Australia and they don't go back. So we have this dichotomy of how we can so we are trying to get Africa to grow and to develop and to have an education system and to have an economy that is going to grow and education is the key to that every government agrees. Yet how can we bring people here and they don't go back because they see what life is like in another country they see the opportunities they're going to go back to poverty. How can we help those countries to grow and develop without having to bring those people out but still give them the benefit of the education? There's other issues around linguistic issues what language are people taught in often it's English or it's French or it's Spanish and it's never their home language. Then there are technological barriers what a colleague and I have called technology dissonance we impose technology solutions on them that they can't afford. We, when I did an evaluation of the academy programme the Cisco Networking Academy programme back in 2001 they still had screens that flickered and we were expecting them to read online all the time and that really is quite hard on the eyes and the students got very tired but we were working on high resolution screens that are easy to read from. We impose a learning methodology and a pedagogy as well when we bring students out here or we work with them overseas that might be different. Again in that evaluation I did in 2001 nuances in pedagogy although teaching is teaching and everyone is trying to move towards a constructivist education model I did see teaching which was had slight differences, slight nuances and it's very important that we allow for that and we understand the cultures that our students come from and the relationship that they have with their teachers which is very different from the relationship that British or American or Australian students have with their teachers. I can't talk about the other countries that are represented here. Then we have these other tensions so if we talk about trying to improve and help improve developing country HEIs by some sort of reciprocal arrangement using technology, co-teaching and we've got a lovely project in western Sydney in schools where we're using interactive whiteboards and video conferencing to co-teach where there is a shortage of teachers. We can do that but then we have this tension about open education resources and transnational education so we're trying to get people to work on a set of resources that may be not culturally suitable. How do we accommodate those and how do you help the developing country at the same time? Alternative access is to higher education through distance learning from home. The problem is the availability of technology. We are working on low cost solutions for that but they are some way off and those low cost solutions are still maybe more expensive than others but they are going to be there but it's going to take time and what do we do in the interim? What about peer review? Peer review is very important but peer review and cultural relevance sometimes don't go together because what is relevant to one country isn't always relevant to another. What about innovation, interactivity, using all these wonderful tools that we can use? Video conferencing for example is very difficult when you have half a meg coming into your campus and yet we're talking about access so we have those tensions and quality is expensive. How can you provide quality at low cost? So there are a number of tensions there between north and south that are causing those chasms to grow and we've got to find a way to try and bring those together. Okay so that's looking at the chasms. Let's look at some of the solutions that people already have come up with. First of all I thought this bit of research I thought was quite interesting. What is it that employers are looking for? If we're going to cross the chasms between education and industry we need to know what employers are looking for and David Thornberg carried out this research in 2004 that showed that technological fluency was very, very important. Great fluency. Communication skills. Collaboration, teamwork, leadership. Interesting how low down creativity comes. That's worrying. Why don't they want their employees to be creative? But what was interesting was that people who got jobs were very happy with cultural diversity. There are so many multinational companies. There are so many people who the world is a big melting pot now. So there's so many immigrants and you have to work with those people and it's very important that you're very happy with that environment. People who have work-life balance and I won't say anything about Cisco there and a sense because I think I'm being broadcast and a sense of pride and excellence. Okay, so what has changed? There are places where those chasms are being bridged. We're seeing some attitudes and approaches in higher and further education. We're seeing some great programmes coming out of GISC. We're seeing portal technology for example. We're looking at some great e-learning coming out like Joram and we're looking at skills and access to e-learning is improving all the time. So we're seeing that. We're seeing this development of personal learning environments and the work that's being done up in Bolton I think and I know that that was a big topic of debate last year at the conference here. But the use of bringing the formal and the informal together through personal learning environments is something that I really think is going to take off and going to make a big difference and that's bridging that chasm. Learning from experts using podcasts and blogs to get some of the top people to come to the university and to interact with the students without being there. So this experts in non-residents and being able to bring them in and giving access to your students to the leading thinkers in your field. But what needs to change? That is where the monkeys come in. I was in Borneo a few years ago and had this great privilege to go on a river barge and see the probiscous monkeys who go and feed. They go up and down the river and our guide said to us, occasionally they cross the river. Now that very, very rarely happens. He said in 25 years he'd never seen it happen. He didn't actually believe they crossed the river. We saw it. We were so lucky. And I just thought it just, for me, it was a great metaphor for what we're talking about here today and at this conference, is how do we get across. And it was great. Those monkeys weren't frightened. Every single one of them lept across. And most of them did what this one did, which was fall into the water. And then they just scrambled up and they carried on, climbed up the tree and they were eating again. And there was one that was really nervous. So the lead monkey, who was always much bigger than the others, he went and sat on a branch and beckoned this monkey across. It was just such a one and he kept going up to the branch and back again and up to the branch and back again. And we were willing him to make it. And he got across and he slithered down the side but then he scrambled up from the bank. And you can see all the other monkeys were really happy. And I thought this is really a metaphor. We have to scramble up the bank sometimes. We might miss. We might do something wrong but if we don't try, it's not going to happen. So we need to think about what needs to be taught, what is actually taught. I realise I can't see this. I've got this thing on. That's another thing about being a corporate backpacker. Everybody watches what you're doing on your computer on a plane. What needs to be taught? What is actually taught? And what is learned? Go back to the porridge and oats situation. What is it what needs to be taught? We keep talking about the knowledge society. And we talk about and every country I go to, we talk to sit to the minister of ICT or the minister of education. We want to be the knowledge society, the knowledge centre for this part of the world. We can't all be there. We need to think about division of labour. We need to think about what skills that we in our country can bring for the rest of the world, for global good. And then we need to think about what's actually taught and what is learned then. We need this much more of this knowing what, knowing that, knowing why, knowing how, knowing where and knowing when. Problem is we're missing out the why. And that's why children don't know that porridge comes from oats. And it's not about a knowledge society. It's about a knowledgeable society. A knowledgeable society so that you are better at agriculture. You're better at manufacturing. You're better at tourism. You're better at health. You're better at the knowledge society. And I think we need to change that knowledge society to the knowledgeable society. And how we can use technology to bridge the chasms for north and south and to make everybody part of the knowledgeable society. And we need to think about how we're going to use that technology because whatever way we design it, it isn't going to be used that way. And I think the telephone was a classic example of that. And this quote from Manuel Castells, I think sums up a lot of that. People will transform the technology themselves. SMS messaging was never, nobody ever thought that would take off. It was just an add-on. But for kids, it's what they use most of the time. The telephone, as an example, was only ever meant to be for listening to concerts and getting public messages. I don't think that's what we ever use the telephone for. And people, we need to make sure that people have the opportunity to be successful. These children in Afghanistan made a satellite dish because they wanted to get television and they couldn't get it out of recycled cans. They took cans and turned it into a satellite dish. And as Robert Sternberg says, in the real world, analytical intelligence is no longer enough. It's not that it no longer matters, but it certainly matters less. We need to be creative and we also need to be practical. We need all three. So learning, I think, has a new focus. We have to think about it as having an informal focus. It's emergent and it's social. And instead of talking about the three Rs, we need to talk about the three P's. Persistence, power tools and play. We're seeing a lot of research going on into gaming, serious gaming, because we recognise the skills that people use when they're playing games. I used to be a maths teacher and the generalisation that students go through when they're playing games, the trial and error, trial and improvement, the metacognitive skills. If they'd used those in a maths lesson, I would have been over the moon, but they didn't, they just did their sums. So we really need to think about how we can bring persistence, making people try again if they get it wrong, working out where they went wrong, using those metacognitive skills, using the power tools at their disposal, all that technology, and learning through play, learning 2.0. We need to make sure that we have richer and more engaging learning experiences for our students. We need to restructure our teaching. Why are we giving lectures in lecture theatres? I'm doing it now. But there are times when you want to do it, but you can put this onto a podcast, and people are watching this on Illuminate, and I hope that their experience is no lesson because they're not in the room. They're able to ask questions and I see some are already appearing and I hope I can answer some of them. I can't phone a friend, can I? So we need to think about that. We also need to think about those authors of content. They're always authoring content when they write their exams, when they produce a piece of multimedia. Are we using that? Are we harnessing that? Are we putting out there for critical review from other students as part of their assessment processes? We've got to think about new ways of teaching, what should be known, making sure that these kids know that porridge comes from oats. It's just an example. I think the name of the game is around collaboration. I sound like Tony Blair now, don't I? Education, education, education. But it is, everything you see and everything we talk about is around collaboration. We have the creative archive, the opportunities to rip, mix and share. Turning the concept of media literacy into more than a good idea. We have open courseware where people can play around with resources and other people are put up with, change it, add to it, put it back up again and share it. Collaboration. We see children who may work together can design their own e-learning environment. This is a bit of work that Shirley Alexander and Lynn Shaverin did in Sydney. And I asked 8-12-year-olds to design their own e-learning environment. And the questions they asked, what do we think and how do we think? These are their questions, not the teachers, but some have been as complex as that. And why aren't we born knowing what we know now? This is serious, these 8-12-year-olds from an ordinary school who came up with these questions and then designed an e-learning environment as a journey through a forest rather than a journey on a train which was the two options they came up with because if they went through a forest the driver would know where he was going if they were on a train, if they went through a forest and they might make some mistakes but that would be okay. We should be listening to those kids, listening to the learners. Then we need to think about the human network, the opportunities that are coming up now, the solutions that are coming up around follow me content, people subscribing to people, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, immersive interactions and making sure that the learning services, the social collaboration, all those resources are there from any device. This is all going to be up available later so you can look at this in more detail because it's a fairly complex slide but it's about a network of people. It's about finding ways to improve that communication so people can collaborate. Integrated learning teams, education partners, multi-format learning and at the back end of that having ways to operate it efficiently and manage it from the administration end. Looking at communication, information sharing, collaboration, decision, support, event management, data integration. We need to think about all of those. We need to think about how we can partition the network so that students can't use MSN and email when they're sitting in a lecture but they can still have their laptops there. How we can make sure that we've got the bandwidth we need without having to make the pipes fatter and fatter. We need to think about that as we increase collaboration so that we can work with developing countries and we can work with each other without having to constantly increase the bandwidth but to find ways of managing the bandwidth more intelligently. We want to look at ways we can use our mobile phones to access all of that so that you have a screen where you can touch the screen and pull up different things education materials, finding experts and using presence and location resources to get to those experts. Use of avatars in education we see a lot of work going on in second life and bridging the divide using things like telepresence or the thunder system or using the two together the thunder system is a electronic note board system where instead of having paper flip charts you have electronic flip charts putting those two together you can really do research you don't have to travel and you can do research across borders. The future education mashups are coming where you're going to be able to have an avatar who will go out and find the information you want link you and locate people with you. This is all about collaboration using google maps using instant messaging and video conferencing all those tools and your avatar will help to locate the people you need the experts because there's been intelligent avatar who will go out and find those for you. Then we need to think about the university links we need to think about how we work with the south and the south working together how we link universities in the developing world as well as those north south engagements that some of you are involved in how can we broaden those, how can we make them better how can we really help those developing countries to develop and then we need joint appointments in Qatar they've taken a brand new university in the knowledge village there and they are said to one of the American universities you can have a free campus but you have to send all your lecturers to teach on this campus we don't want local people teaching and you will co-teach with them so that's the way that they're trying to build up the skills in country because those people who are taught by those those American lecturers will then become the teachers of the next generation so it's really really about capacity building in a very very positive way although they have a lot more money in Qatar than they do in say Kenya we need to think about making sure that education is locally relevant but also making sure it fits in the global model we are in a globalised society and we need to really push these low cost access solutions okay I'm going to finish off with my caveats sometimes those smaller steps aren't it you do need to sort of maybe paddle across the water test things out I didn't mention one of the things I came across yesterday where I think it was on the biggest chasms that was ever been jumped which is the RSA academy where they have built a school around a new curriculum so it's a new curriculum, a very innovative curriculum called Opening Minds and they've built a school around that so there are some really exciting things going on being heralded as a real showpiece and it might actually change things in school education so we need to think about identifying the relevant knowledge what it is to be knowledgeable in your country in your society, in your town, in your university thinking about do we always need to give lectures can we do podcasts instead making closer links and ties with schools and the workplace and with higher education and the workplace the reason that the universities in the US are the top 10 is because of their links with industry and their business incubation making sure that all e-portfols are interoperable and that we're using them right from school onward so we do get these small steps which build up into this lifelong learning piece which is seamless schools being preparations for lifelong learning and recognising that from the recent study by Demos those learners are groundbreaking pioneers they're not all homo-zapiens they are, but they are using this technology and the big thing assessment is very political changing assessment takes time in schools so how can we really that's the thing, that's the biggest cousin we have to jump that's the biggest leap we have to make if we can make that then I think all the other places will fall into place thank you thank you very much Michelle we've got a little time for questions and we're going to take questions from the floor and also a few questions that have come in via illuminate so we have a roving mic so if you'd like to ask a question can you put up your hand and wait a minute till the microphone reaches you any questions while you're thinking what I'm going to do is start with one that's come from illuminate which is this that Michelle you've put a lot of emphasis on text no longer being king or queen how does that square with the phenomenal success of Wikipedia as a largely text based medium that's a very good question I mean text is no longer king it doesn't mean it isn't important it's just that there are that you tube is phenomenally successful and there's teacher tube now so it's the fact that we always place it above everything else rather than actually looking at the other media as an equal resource okay let's see some questions from the floor yes there's one at the back there thanks Michelle on your presentation you showed us the questions that some 8 and 12 year olds had come up with and I suppose sort of paraphrasing that the questions they'd come up with were sort of about self understanding and independent exploring or exploration I suppose the big chasm is where does the teacher fit into all this or maybe how does the teacher fit into all this I think the teacher is without the teacher the teacher was there supporting the children asking questions to them to help them think to bring out their ideas because they don't always know what questions to ask in terms of how they're going to design the environment so modelling the learning process I think is what I see teachers doing they're expert learners in that domain and they model the learning process that's how you learn as an apprentice when you sit at the foot of the master you learn by asking questions watching the way that the master works and you ask the questions and you learn the job that way so I see teachers and students in that role There's one just down there halfway down on the right right at the end I just wanted to ask Michelle how you think we should address the issue of literacy because in universities now we've got a big problem with literacy issues and challenges associated with students and personally the fact that I know you said about students learning less in a linear fashion I think this has had an impact on their literacy and you don't seem to have addressed that within your presentation I only had 40 minutes One of the interesting things that we did a few years ago I was like gosh it's 10 years ago now with the EDCE project we were looking at we were working in a primary school and these students were writing emails to other students and they took so much more care in their spelling, their grammar the way they created their sentence because they were writing for an authentic audience I think what happens in schools is you know your teacher expects you to make mistakes and therefore she'll correct it for you and when you have to write for another audience then you start to see them taking more care and more pride in their work so I think that I agree with you literacy standards have fallen despite all the literacy hour all the efforts that have been made in England to improve the quality of literacy and I think it really is around finding new ways of teaching literacy that really engage the students in their lives and in their way and then maybe we can get back to the standards that we should expect but I think I do see an improvement when students have to write in school for another audience and I think that's probably one way forward Can we have just one more question yes down there at the front we've got to do a little bit of microphone relay passing here so right down at the front here one more question and that'll have to be the last one I'm afraid Michelle in your presentation I get the idea talking about active students that are actually willing to learn what's your opinion on students that are not so willing to learn aren't they fallen behind in this new approach? Well I think that's a big problem they're not willing to learn because they have to leave their culture outside the school grounds and they come into school and they resent being there the tools they use to learn to relate to others inside school and what they're learning they don't see as relevant it doesn't fit their idea of what they're going to need I used to be a maths teacher if a child said to me and they did occasionally how is this going to help me get a job which is what they did then I knew I'd failed as a teacher because I wasn't giving them an experience to engage with because kids love solving problems solving puzzles and I just wasn't giving them enough of that to do so it's about really bringing their culture within the school gates and giving them opportunities also there's lots of other social issues around that but if we can try and get them into school and want them to be there then they'll want to learn because everyone learns that's the problem this has been a really excellent start to the conference I think one of the points that Michelle picked up about children and trying to understand children's learning all of us who've got teenage children I think we ought to thank them for their contribution as research partners I don't think I could ever have done my research without the contribution of my two teenage children so thanks to all our children and thank you very much Michelle for raising such relevant themes to the conference and also leaving us with big issues that we need to confront to confront it's not often that we can rise above the narrow issues of how you design learning materials for your own context and think about what are the global issues that are now confronting learning technology and you've helped us to do that thank you very much indeed I'd also like to thank Illuminate and also Linda Kerner who's done a great job in plucking out some questions I'm sorry we haven't been able to cover them all but certainly Illuminate has been successful I've just been monitoring some of the private chat that's been going on and we've had colleagues for example from the Palestine Polytechnic University in Hebron Palestine so our Palestinian colleagues have been watching this talk and participating so thank you Illuminate for making that possible