I have been exploring emerging technology in relation to my pedagogy as a teacher of Art since the days of the Commodor Amiga computer in the mid 1980’s, and the wonderful ‘Deluxe Paint’ drawing and animation application that Electronic Arts created for it. The Amiga captured and enraptured students who were perhaps not otherwise interested in artistic creativity, who spent hours creating images, animations, websites and films; far happier with mouse and screen than with pencil, paper and paint. Disruptive boys in particular, pacified by an addiction to the technology. It is this that fascinated me from the beginning, alongside my own professional experience; transformed by laptop, spellcheck, spreadsheet and database. Over the past twenty five years I have consistently experimented with digital technology as this technology has developed, through my teaching and through my own creative work. My leaning as an educator is strongly to the left, with connections and interests in experimental schools such as Summerhill and Monkton Wyld, the Small School, Education Otherwise, and the Waldorf and Montessori movements. Current educational thinking seems also to be leaning towards an increase in the importance of creative, learner led education (in theory if not in practice) responding to the fast developing digital realm that Tim Reilly termed ‘web 2.0’, now equally rapidly transforming into ‘mobile 2.0’.
This project will explore the use of mobile technology in education, and this developing integration of mobile devices, global positioning, image capturing and social networking. My research will be both a practical application of mobile devices and locative technology, and an exploration current pedagogy in relation to these developments.
The practical project that I am proposing will be based in the Sydney gardens in Bath, and links that I have established with the education department of the Holburne Museum based in the gardens.
The project will involve the use of Hewlett Packard’s Mediascape, with mobile phones and Skype for voice recording, social networking and SMS, exploring the realms of ludology, aural history and digital story telling through sound recording and image manipulation. The outcome of the project will be secondary to the pedagogy and practicalities behind it’s production. I will be aiming toward a collaboration , a group project, rather than presenting my own work of art. I will be catalyst, facilitator, observer and archivist.
I will be working with a small group of teenagers at risk of exclusion, using a group of my own students to experiment, trial, and develop ideas for the project.
The theoretical basis for this work is strongly underpinned by the research of the Futurelab organisation.
