 If you just missed Seb Schmoller's inspirational talk you have to watch it afterwards and it reminds me to say something that goes unsaid most of the time which is that the reason we're in this business, at least some of us, maybe all of us is that it seems clear now, 50 years after the idea of using technology for learning was born it seems clear now that our best hope for transforming education making the world a more educated place is the use of technology and so I want to focus my remarks on research in the field of technology enhanced learning and I want to do it in a full shared knowledge of the fact that the best I'm going to do is cherry pick a few examples of research that I'm familiar with with no pretense whatsoever for completeness, I'm acutely aware I left the banquet last night early because I had flooding into my mind all the things I'm not going to be able to say and I ask you to take what I say with that constraint that I'm going to place on the territory of research in technology enhanced learning a few landmarks that will start or continue an already existing discussion and I'm going to start, I have the words of Sarah ringing in my ears when she phoned me up last week she said don't just tell us things that we can go away and read afterwards so I'm going to start by telling you a few things that you can go and read about afterwards this slide on the screen now is for me to remind me to tell you a few things it's not expected, I used to be a teacher and I know that you can't have this many words on a slide but the technology enhanced learning research program has just come into its final lap I wonder how many Olympic metaphors I'm going to manage to squeeze into one talk we're on the final straight, it closes in December 31st and it has consisted of a rough and exciting journey of researchers in the computing sciences researchers in the learning sciences, more than 150 researchers, more than 30 universities industrial partners, teachers, practitioners, lecturers it's a long story and I don't intend to tell it here but what I would like to do is to just give a pointer to a document that is just recently being produced and I know that many of you have taken a copy of this as you registered for this conference we called it system upgrade, I don't know if precious twee titles like that are a good idea but that's what we called it and here's a list of the contributors which you can feast your eyes on as I'm speaking but just say thank you to them the point being this, at the core of the technology enhanced learning research program were eight very well funded projects that span between two and four years each and the question that's kept me awake at night is okay clearly if you have a project that is well funded for the duration of that project two things follow one is everybody involved will do as good a job as they can because their careers depend on it and secondly somebody's got to worry about the big ideas of which the individual research project is an instance what's the class that the project is an instance of and what I want to do today is just give you a taster of some of the organizing ideas here are a dozen organizing ideas which I don't need you don't need to memorize there won't be an assessment on this at the end of the lecture but we need to get some sense of what the big ideas are and here's the reason Seb reminded us what an instant of human history tool making human beings have been well borrowing that idea it is a fantastically short time since anybody had the idea of using technology for learning an instant in history 80 years after the invention of the printing press still the only thing that was being published was the Bible and we're in that sort of biblical era without meaning to in any way detract from the fantastic work that's been on display in this conference out in the sustainably real world the impact of technology is only just beginning and Seb was right there isn't going to be a tipping point where one day everything was normal and the next day something special will happen that will change everybody's life it will be an incremental effect so I want to point out a few of the research issues that have struck me as important over the life of the tail research program and as I said before to place a few landmarks on the landscape not to map the territory mapping the territory is far too much for one lecture so one of the things that's clearly striking is the power of personal devices and here's an example the personal inquiry project that was run by Mike Sharples and Eileen Scanlon recognizing that these machines that everybody enters into their educational lives with in their pockets are much more than devices for engaging in Facebook so you know your mobile phone has an accelerometer in it why can't that accelerometer be harnessed to teach people something about the motion of objects and I'm going to give you a global advertisement now otherwise I'm going to have to keep doing it I'm going to tell you so little about each project and I'm going to short change my colleagues who did the work in those projects so badly that you will have no alternative but to visit the website and find out more and increase our hit rate but one of the issues that I think arises from their project and arises from all of us now is how do personal and consumer devices actually change the relationship between informal and informal learning there's a huge wave now I've just been at a conference that was dominated by Americans now they know the answer the answer is BYOD bring your own device fantastic everybody has the machines in their pocket there's wireless connectivity everywhere there's an app for everything there are 600,000 apps so that must be 600,000 times as good as just having one app and it's just terrific because the schools and colleges and universities don't even have to buy technology anymore and you don't have to be as cynical as me to realize that there's a flaw in that argument so on the one hand the flaw is simple you know, bits of technology don't change the world by themselves people use technologies in ways which are more or less world changing but there is a germ of truth the idea that you could sit on a train and guarantee that every other person has an iPad or sorry iPad like device is incredibly short time I mean it didn't seem to be like that two years ago or even one year ago so something has changed and what we really have to explore and we have very very few answers about this we have to explore what the relationship, how formal learning will change as a result of the informal interactions that are taking place between all of us using very cheap, very effective, very simple devices and we also have to ask ourselves the question is that simplicity a single-edged sword or is it a double-edged sword because there is a sense, I mean I've got an iPad like everybody else, I love it and I protect it from anybody else touching it and all those things but you know there is a dangerous lesson for us as educators if we really think that a device with a system of things that you point with your finger is going to change our relationship to knowledge and to learning picking up on that theme I think that probably the most important and most researched area and still to be researched area is the area of collaboration I think that we see from the alacrity with which the whole world has embraced devices which bring people closer together that collaboration really is one of the world-changing ideas devices that support us in what we appear to want to do as human beings are clearly important for our own emotional and social development and they're probably good for our cognitive development as well and in the SynergyNet project one of the central ideas was to ask if we have huge iPads and little children exploring the world on that big iPad-like table what will that do not for their learning about arithmetic or history or whatever but what will it do about their way of thinking together and about who can collaborate what in a team I don't want to go down the teamwork is the 21st century skill and we have to teach everybody how to do teamwork so that we can compete with the Americans and the Chinese that road lies madness but I think it is true that harnessing the collaborative potential of technology which has become a real possibility now in a way in which it could have been only a dream 10 or 15 years ago is something that we clearly need to research more avidly it's a good example of how I make the point and then realise that I had a slide that told me to make that point but never mind one of the interesting projects in the TEL program was the HAPTEL project which I can tell you the short version that they tell about themselves but it's much more exciting than that so the short version is we've dreamed up this fantastic virtual reality system so that people, dental students can learn how to drill teeth without inflicting pain on real people first which so far so good but actually it's a much more interesting project than that because it raises really fundamental question the fundamental question is this the interactions that we have with machines really we've learned are very, very critical in generating cognitive and emotional advance who could have predicted that the difference between poking at a screen with a stylus and poking at a screen with your finger which is clearly a stupid thing to do I mean look at the size of your finger but it has made a difference hasn't it I'm not saying which is better but it's made a difference and certainly poking at a screen with your finger is a very different activity than typing on a keyboard especially a keyboard which was designed 200 years ago to stop the keys sticking which is why the letters are put in such an unlearnable relationship to each other so finding out how these different modalities and obviously I'm not a future gazer but it's obvious that the range of modalities with which we will interact with technology is going to increase at an alarming rate reading our eye movements and gestures and so on there's already signs of that there let's not go down the future will be great road one of the most important and least researched areas of technology enhanced learning is how to support the most important element in the learning process now and throughout the lifetime of everybody in this room and probably everybody in this room's grandchildren too will be the teacher I don't rule out the possibility that one day the computer will be able to do what a brilliant teacher does but I do rule it out in our lifetimes and the next generation's lifetime as well so it's very welcome that Diana Lorela's project which is called Learning Designer is a project about supporting teachers to be the professionals and lesson designers that they want to be and one of the points I think she and her really interdisciplinary team makes very forcibly is that if you consider the kinds of things that professionals have at their disposal the software that architects use the machines that medics use almost everywhere that you look the kinds of things that engineers need the way that music has been transformed by technology if you look at those kind of technologies and say and what is the technology, what is the rich set of tools that a teacher can use to enhance his or her productivity and his or her professionalism and his or her role as a designer of learning experiences for their students the answer is not that much we all know what tools are available but many of those tools do a great job at recapitulating with technology what you would do anyway and there's nothing wrong with that if technology can make life easier in those simple ways than so be it but what Diana puts very forcibly is the potential of having a machine that makes sense of what the teacher is doing in designing new courses or new lectures or new lessons that understands the teacher's point of view that says well actually not just people who have used that lesson have also used that lesson that's not difficult to do but to say well if that's the way you're looking at your lesson then you might like to think about what implications that has for learning and teaching and you may like to be connected with people who are doing it but also with things to read and videos to watch and things to do that will make you think more deeply about it I think building tailor made professional tool kits semantic tool sets that understand each other and what the humans are doing with those tools are an important lesson and I think finally almost finally in this section of my talk but you never know because you have to be watching so many screens at once here it's too difficult I think that for me there are two questions that are overarching with technology and learning one that I haven't said that much about yet but I'm going to devote the whole second part of my talk to which is how does the water of learning change with technology that is designed innovatively in a revolutionary way but the other question is who can learn that couldn't learn before the interlife project focuses on a very interesting area of emotional computing something that we're going to see far more of using second life as a way for disadvantaged people to interact with each other to help them overcome difficult transitions in their lives that's a really powerful, difficult challenge we're not very good yet at having computers that help us with the emotional side of our existence but of course we all know that the emotional side is crucial if we want people to learn and reciprocally, learning and knowledge is a very powerful way to help people with emotional difficulties and the ECHOS project too great project for the following reason if you consider autistic children and you realise that the difficulty with autistic children that the autistic children have is that they don't have a sense of other they tend not to have a sense of other by the way, here's the standard disclaimer autism is a huge spectrum you haven't either got it or you haven't got it it's not a disease forgive me if time constraints make me talk in a shorthand that is sometimes a little dangerous but the interesting thing the ECHOS project built an artificially intelligent little agent, there's Andy on the bottom left hand corner who responds in very predictable ways to what the human user is doing eye trackers and gestures and all kinds of things details suppressed, you can find them yourself but two interesting things one is that whenever you study an extreme of human behaviour it's telling you something about the norm I should have put the adjective so called in front of extreme and norm and everybody to a greater or lesser degree has to face the challenge of how to interact and understand what it means to interact with other human beings and so some of the teachers that are using the ECHOS system are reporting very interesting things happening with children who are not apparently on the autistic spectrum because, and here's the second interesting thing about technology, if you build a system you have to build a formal system it has to do the right thing at the right time and it has to do it for everybody so I think we're going to see artificial intelligence techniques for emotional engagement as an area of research which is really only just getting underway it's amazing when you consider artificial intelligence is about 60 years old it's amazing how little that has permeated into ordinary teaching and learning well it isn't amazing really it's tough stuff and it's asking some of the most difficult questions of all and of course the ultimate holy grail of artificial intelligence I suppose which is can you make a machine do what human beings do is completely impossible because we have no idea how human beings do what they do anyway we know how human beings do trivial things like playing chess but not how they stand up and walk through a door that's closed and so on, how they open a door and these are really difficult things the things that Marvin Minsky said the things that we've forgotten how we learned the things that are most difficult to teach okay, you've read that? this really is the last project of this part of the talk that I'm going to do to talk about but Ensemble is a very interesting project because it's using the semantic web in interesting and powerful ways so it's saying we have a pedagogy that we would like to employ in their case they've chosen case-based learning immersing students in what it means to design a dance, choreograph a dance or to steer ships into harbours a fantastic array of interesting things that they've worked on and the issue is can we encourage the students to build using semantic web tools to create their own visions and their own representations and their own collaborative objects with which to learn and I think that's enough of the detail I think that we really are seeing now the second big change that's happened with the web from the first role of the web as just a huge library to the second phase of the web as a social milieu and now this third phase that we're entering that people are working very hard on still huge research challenges as a place to reuse data, to remix data to bring disparate sources of data together and create from the data that exists in huge quantities and to make sense of it in a word, in a sentence, to turn information into knowledge Right, well that reminds me what comes next I don't know how many of you went to the Hockney exhibition in London but I had this really, and by the way I then found out that hundreds and thousands of people had the same realisation so it wasn't just as I was so brilliant but you go into this exhibition and some beautiful paintings by Hockney and then there's this huge room with about 100 pictures and I knew something was wrong by the way I live a very sheltered life I'm training to be a high court judge so I don't listen to the radio or watch television or read newspapers so I should have done that first and then I would have known what I was going to face but what actually happens to you is that you stand in front of a painting, his one probably breaching all copyright and you think there's something different about this and you know, is it better, is it worse? He's got new paint brushes Well, you know the ending of the story now because this was a year ago and everybody's been talking about it non-stop he did all these paintings on an iPad and I don't know the first thing about watercolor or even any kind of painting but I think what Hockney says is a really interesting metaphor for us he says there are gains and losses there are things that you miss, there are things that you gain there are things that you can do with the technology no, sorry, let me start that sentence again there are things you can do with this technology that you do differently with that technology and I forget that paint brushes were invented and they represented a very powerful technology for their time which hasn't ended either so I want to spend the rest of my talk what, time to start? I want to spend the rest of my talk talking about the ways that meaning, knowledge stuff to know is potentially transformed by technology and to explore in both directions how the tools shape, if not determined but certainly shape the knowledge at stake and how evolving knowledge also shapes the tools that we use because we use tools in different ways depending on what we know, what we think and what we feel and who we're collaborating with and I want to start with an example that struck me very forcibly a few years ago so forgive me, you may have seen it before but it's just so stunning that I can't resist it just after the first banking crisis when layman brothers went belly up Goldman Sachs, the chief financial accountant of Goldman Sachs plaintively gave an interview to somebody I think from CNN and he said we were seeing things that were 25 standard deviations from the mean, several days in a row now, I don't want this to develop into a maths lesson but this is what he meant here's the normal distribution it's chopped up into six, three on each side, standard deviations and all you need to know is that by the time you get to the third standard deviation you've nearly picked up the whole lot, 99.7% by the time you've got ten standard deviations it's 99.99999 for a very long time and by the time you're at 25 standard deviations it's worth asking what sort of a number is that any guesses? Roughly, sort of, you know, a few trillion it actually turns out to be six times ten to the power of 124 times the life of the universe so far and this guy says we were seeing it three days in a row and something must have been a bit odd, right? now why am I telling you this story? by the way, somebody, I was told this as an audience earlier in the year and somebody said oh but he must have known the chief financial accountant of Goldman Sachs must know that the normal distribution is the wrong way to look at a problem like this and you know what, they're probably right and that makes it worse because if that's true he must have been confident that nobody would notice and really my whole objective here is to say we should notice these are the things that we need to teach people the knowledge that powers the world is less and less visible you know, so when I was a little boy I used to take my dad's watch to pieces and I think I learned something about, well, something about something cogs and wheels and things like that you take our watches apart, most of us here there's nothing to see at all take all those devices that you're tweeting oh, I wish I hadn't said that I've got to face the Twitter feed when I finish, I suppose but you take any of those devices to pieces what the hell do you see, nothing, a circuit board if you're lucky, even less so this is a very, very difficult conundrum for us all the world is powered by these devices increasingly but we can't easily get access to that's why we need formal education by the way I'm not a de-schooler I don't care how clever the technology gets and how much MIT opens its open source stuff to people you need an inspired teacher to help you understand the things that are really difficult to bump into by yourself I'm going to give you an example of what I mean which doesn't come from anywhere near the Technology Enhance Learning Research Program but it speaks to me as a mathematician because all my life I've been trying to find ways to share with people the joy of what it means to think mathematically knowing full well that it's a lost cause and I've lost track of the number of times you see somebody at a party and they seem pretty normal and happy to talk to you for a few minutes and then the dreaded moment comes and you say, what do you do? I used to say I was a professor of maths education they always say two things I had to say, oh you must be so clever which is almost as bad as oh I was never any good at maths at my school with a little laugh that shows that actually they're quite proud of not being very good at maths at their school but joking apart the joy of what I'm going to show you isn't anything really to do with the mathematics but of bringing a live experience so here's a flock of birds and nobody it should be a video but I couldn't find one nobody who's ever seen a flock of birds do this which is everybody, right? could have avoided asking themselves how do they know where to go and the fluidity of the flock is there one at the front and what happens when they meet a cloud and all those things, right? so I thought wouldn't this be fantastic and here comes the major problem not just with teaching mathematics but teaching in general which is if you want authenticity it seems like authenticity goes with complexity and if you need complexity you immediately rule out understanding by ordinary people who may not want to engage at a very deep level over a very long amount of time so I thought what is the answer to this conundrum of how the birds know where to go and I'm in a happy position now to share with you the answer okay, this really is the set of differential equations that we'll tell you and I have met a collaborator of the man who's cited on this page who vouches for the fact that he can tell me exactly what it means and I have to tell you that I don't have the slightest idea what it means mathematics is a fantastically compartmentalized subject like every other one and I only have the slightest notion of what it means but if I had the right technology this is where we probably find out that my... oh, great I think I should share with you that both my screens have gone blank is there anybody here who can help? oh, fantastic okay, sorry about that the great thing about technology is it's so liberating, isn't it? I'm going to populate this screen with 300 little birds randomly placed I'm going to say go and off they go, random directions but then there's something samey about all the directions and clumpy, samey and clumpy okay, it doesn't matter what this was written in it was written in that logo it doesn't matter what the particular rules are you've all seen simulations of this kind but the important idea here is that the only thing a bird needs to know is where's its nearest neighbor and which direction is that bird going in trust me, that's roughly true but there is one other thing that's really important about this simulation is that because it's written in that logo it is a relatively simple matter to reprogram it for yourself and I've seen very young children and I've seen university students reprogramming a simulation like this so this is an example of how we can begin to rise to the challenge of making visible the mechanism if I had to have a slogan for what I'm going to say next it's make the mechanism visible I almost feel like it's kind of like going around the world uncovering stones and then trying to make artifacts from what you see so that the thing that makes the phenomenon tick becomes accessible, becomes shareable you know the best way to collaborate with somebody is to have an object to collaborate with and if you can look inside that object and share how it works and see some representation of how it works then so much the better I'm just going to say a few words about a strand of research that I've been involved in for 15 years now and with the blue background are some of the work groups that I've been involved with most notably some really fascinating work with nurses about 15 years ago with airline pilots I tell you if you look at some of the raw transcripts of our interview data with pilots you will never fly again engineers and most recently some fascinating stuff with car workers and people in call centres right I've got 10 minutes call centres, finances we have very interesting interviews with people working in the pension department of a big company and we thought we'd ask them some elementary questions and one of the questions we asked them was if you pay half a percent per month what's that equivalent to per year and we had a cunning plan we thought if we start with a simple question like that and they'll all say six after all you know anybody can multiply 12 by half and then we can say aha what you've forgotten about is the compounding effect of interest and we discovered an amazing thing we discovered that almost everybody we interacted with had no idea that there was any relationship between monthly and annual interest in the first place it was almost as if they did their job perfectly well but they did their job by pulling down data on a spreadsheet and you will have noticed that the latest version of Excel for the Macintosh maybe it's true for Windows as well does not by default give you the formula bar have you come across that interesting thing so the wonderful example of this fantastically powerful engine which deliberately thank you Bill Gates deliberately sets out to make invisible the most important part of the spreadsheet well I'm going to have to zip through the rest and come to a conclusion but it was almost what we found in one workplace after another is people doing their job extremely well I don't want to be interpreted as saying we went out into the field with a microphone and found all these stupid people, not at all but what we did find is that numbers were just like labels so it's as if a number 9 bus like this one here was half the size of a number 18 bus what a silly idea shameless advertising cast a veil over that but I'll tell you the last thing on this subject which is this is incredibly dangerous not having a sense of mechanism for number is a real challenge of our time and here is Peter Hitchens on the climate change denier website saying all existing scientific data are suppositions, allegations and predictions numbers prove nothing that is a spine-chilling thing to say and I think that I'm using the number example really as a kind of epitome of the problem that if you don't have a sense of how things work in this case how numbers work people can say the most outrageous things to you and it's like saying the world was created in six days four thousand years ago whatever it is the creationists say currently and you say well that's a point of view numbers prove nothing okay systems are read only the missing piece of knowledge is how things work this can all go and I'll keep sir and happy I'll stop in just two minutes and I just want to give you the last example which is the project that I was personally involved in as part of the TELL program and we had this sense I suppose of the same idea the most important mathematical idea that we try to teach kids and adults and I've taught at university too there is no level of the education sector which is immune for this the most important thing we try to teach is a mathematical way of thinking so the understanding that if you say something is true for all cases then it's not enough to show that it's only true for the first four this is a kind of algebraic way of thinking and yet what we do in schools and colleges is we teach well we teach the notes without teaching the tune we say here's how you manipulate algebraic expressions and we think that from doing that the general idea of just what a fantastically powerful tool algebra is will emerge and I think we do it in lots of different subjects and I ask you just for yourself because I haven't got any time to think of analogies in your own specialism but really what we were saying is algebra is not a good way to learn algebra in other words algebra thought of as a way of thinking about the world and algebra as a way of manipulating statements are not the same thing I'm being really fiercely glared at now so I'm going to have to build new representations for existing knowledge okay well I've sort of said that I'm stopping okay so terror research who needs it we have to confront reality at this conference you confronted reality by staying here so long thank you for that the reality is the circumstances, rationales and the representations for learning have changed we cannot afford to just borrow technologies that existed in the past and pedagogies that fit with those technologies we have to confront that reality thank you very much