THE LEARNING UNDERWORLD: HOW TECHNOLOGY SUPPORTS BAD EDUCATION

Joe Cullen The Tavistock Institute London United Kingdom E-mail: j.cullen@tavinstitute.org

KEYWORDS

e-Learning, social inclusion,post-modern theory

ABSTRACT

This paper is about the learning revolution that never happened, and the missed opportunities along the current evolutionary track of e-learning. Its central argument is that the development of e-learning models, technologies, services and practices has reinforced, rather than supplanted, outmoded forms of pedagogy that are based primarily on a ‘human capital’, rather than a ‘transformative’ approach to learning. The paper explores how ‘post-modern’ theories of both learning and technology can help identify some of the ‘gaps’ in the development and application of e-learning systems and services – particularly in terms of the potential contribution e-learning can make to promoting ‘social inclusion’. With reference to a range of real-world examples, including RTD projects funded under EC Programmes, it explores ‘what doesn’t work and why’, and makes some proposals for engaging technology within a more radical learning agenda.

LEARNING AND SOCIAL EXCLUSION

This is a true story. Chesney is a fifteen year old attending (loosely speaking) a large secondary school in an unlovely part of the sprawl that corsets London’s outer suburbs. Consistently performing below the Government’s examination targets, the school, and its indefatigable head teacher, stagger from crisis to crisis almost on a daily basis, tackling funding shortfalls; teenage pregnancies; riots; ethnic skirmishes and OFSTED visits with consistent equanimity. As part of a package of measures designed to reduce truancy and promote more active participation in school life, the Management Team have integrated within the curriculum a number of more esoteric courses, including yoga. It was to one of these yoga classes, much to the astonishment of the Head of Year, that Chesney, who had hitherto expressed no interest in anything other than a desire to fly a 747, was seen progressing. The Head of Year congratulated Chesney on his new found enthusiasm for learning, adding that he was rather surprised to see him at yoga. Yes agreed Chesney, it did seem unusual, but he wasn’t about to miss this class. After all, hadn’t his form teacher told him that it was a pilot project.

Education is to supposed to help kids like Chesney break out of a cycle of apathy, low expectations and poor performance by showing them new horizons, equipping them with new skills and providing them with opportunities to do something that their parents, grandparents and great grandparents never did before – like flying a Jumbo jet. Yet there are strong grounds for concluding that it fails them. A substantial body of evidence suggests that educational differences within the school system are crucial in generating and sustaining social exclusion. Low educational achievement increases the risk of adult exclusion in many ways. For example, adults with low basic skills are five times more likely to be unemployed as those with average skills (Sparkes, 1999). The OECD PISA comparative national surveys of educational capacity, carried out every three years, show on the one hand marked variation in learning outcomes across different school systems and cultures, and on the other, a tendency for disparities in educational attainment to be exacerbated by social exclusion. In other words, existing educational inequalities are made worse by poor learning environments. The literature suggests that this process is mediated through three inter-related factors: the personal background of the student; the school environment in which learning takes place, and the broader social environment in which the student engages with other social actors.

e-Learning is supposed to help address this situation. One of the great European slogans of the past decade, alongside global competitiveness and freedom of movement, has been ‘lifelong learning for all’. The crusade associated with lifelong learning has had two distinctive features: firstly, it has been explicitly linked to the agenda of social inclusion; and, secondly, it has been set within the context of the widespread diffusion of new technologies as part of the burgeoning ‘Knowledge Society’. The twin strategies adopted by the European Union of information for all and lifelong learning are essentially connected to the belief that the new technologies in a networked world will liberate access to education and training resources not formerly available to large swathes of marginalised groups such as ethnic minority communities, women the unemployed, those with disabilities and ‘drop outs’ from the education system. It is a view that has been adopted with much enthusiasm, via a raft of policy instruments like the White Paper on Education and Training: towards the Learning Society (1994); the Lisbon Conference, the eEurope Action Plans, and the various Framework RTD programmes. Yet, there is increasing evidence that new technologies may be working to increase rather than reduce inequalities, and promote rather than eradicate the so-called ‘digital divide’. As an illustration, let’s return to Chesney’s school. As part of European Commission-funded project exploring the use of e-learning in a social inclusion context, we carried out an experiment in collaboration with the school’s staff and students. The experiment entailed enrolling one of the classes in a European Schools Network project called ‘Energy on the Move’. This was set up as a competition for groups of between twenty and thirty students from thirty European schools, the objective being to develop and present an energy strategy for Europe. They were supported by e-mail and Internet access to scientists from the European Space Agency, the European Space Operations Centre, Joint European Torus, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) and the European Synchronotron Radiation Facility. In turn, teacher support was provided by the ESP.

We looked at how participation in this ‘collaborative knowledge network’ affected learning processes and outcomes – particularly by measuring students’ scores in science examinations before, during and after participation (as well as gathering more qualitative data on student experiences). The results were striking. What happened was in the early period following introduction of the technology, the performance of the class improved overall. However, performance then declined – except for a sub-group within the class, whose examination scores continued to improve throughout the period of the examination. This sub group consisted of the existing ‘high achievers’, who already had demonstrated aptitude in science, and who were predicted to get good marks at certification. For the other students, there was a clear ‘learning decline’ effect identified by the study, which was associated with two things: firstly an ‘intrinsic’ process associated with frustration and demotivation engendered because of technical difficulties experienced in accessing the technologies, the limited resources available and the lack of technical support. Secondly, an ‘extrinsic’ process associated with a mis-match between the learning environment in the classroom (characterised by mentoring) and the non-supportive learning environment at home.

The ‘Energy on the Move’ experiment suggests that, far from narrowing the educational performance gap, e-learning can contribute to widening it. As the PISA surveys demonstrate, there is no clear correlation per se between educational provision, wealth creation and social inclusion. In the UK for example, although educational spending in absolute terms has increased progressively over the past decade (Figure 1), the gap between the richest and poorest has also increased (Figure 2). However, it should be noted that, along with many countries, the UK has progressively scaled down its relative spending on education in recent years (Figure 3). Yet countries like Italy and Turkey have increased their educational spending but occupy a lower position on the PISA educational performance league than both traditional ‘high flyers’ like Finland and ‘less developed’ countries like China.

Figure 1: Educational SpendingUK

Figure 2: Disparities in Wealth UK

Figure 3: Educational Spending (Source OECD)

These patterns suggest that the relationship between educational provision, performance and social inclusion is extremely complex. But what the PISA surveys suggest for education generally – and what might also hold true for e-learning – is that learning outcomes are associated with variables like motivation, self-belief and learning strategies, and are therefore likely to be linked to factors like levels of social cohesion; the quality and relevance of the learning environment; the degree of integration between learning and the ‘life-world’ and the relationship between learning and ‘life chances’. What seems to be not in doubt is that ‘bad education’, linked to other dynamics like low income; labour market exclusion; housing status; degree of social capital and neighbourhood status, will contribute to the reinforcement of ‘cycles of deprivation’ (Bradshaw et al, 2004; Godfrey, 2002; Good, 1998; Millar, 2001).

Yet there is some evidence to suggest that some societies are less ‘exclusion prone’ than others (Litchfield, 2003), and one factor that could contribute to explaining this differentiation – and indeed why social exclusion remains so intransigent – centres on cognitive, cultural and discursive processes that shape how poverty and exclusion are socially constructed and how they relate to identity and ‘learning’. From its formative years, exploring linkages between social cohesion and social pathologies, (Durkheim, 1951; Merton, 1968; Giddens, 1973), a recurrent theme in social science is that cultures, communities and groups that develop strong and adaptive mechanisms to promote cohesion and solidarity are somehow more resistant to the forces of social dislocation and social exclusion, and hence more resilient. On the one hand, it is suggested that sustained and repetitive exposure to social and economic ills – poverty; ill-health; upheaval; unemployment – itself saps the collective spirit and therefore ultimately increases the vulnerability of those exposed to social and economic pathologies (Elstad, 1998; Kreiger, 2004; Berkman et al, 2000). Conversely, some studies argue that environments characterised by highly developed levels of ‘social capital’ and ‘social cohesion’ do not suffer the effects of deprivation to the same extent as cultures in which “civil society” is less well-developed (Kawachi et al, 2000; Wilkinson, 1996; Lynch et al, 2000; Kunitz, 2001). In this regard, some writers sometimes refer to social exclusion as if it were a form of ‘inheritance’. In the case of poverty, though experiences vary widely, fewer people break out of poverty cycles than is commonly believed. The research suggests that. “Chronic poverty can be inherited from a child's parents and from the wider community or society.” (Harper et al, 2003). Furthermore, there is some evidence to suggest that social exclusion leads to unintentionally self-defeating behavior (Twenge, et al, 2002). There is a strong argument that education is a key contributing factor in this process of ‘exclusion inheritance’, because it is ‘learned’ through communicative interaction in peer groups and in the community, and passed down from generation to generation. For example, there is a long pedigree of writing on language and oppression, perhaps best exemplified in Paulo Freire’s work in South American favellas, and his development of the concept of ‘conscientisation’ (Freire, 1972). In this context, ‘illiteracy’ itself has increasingly been highlighted as both a cause and effect of exclusion - and a defining factor in all power relations (Archer and Costello, 1990). More fundamentally, a number of theorists writing from what might loosely be called a post-modernist position have emphasised the enduring role played by the education system in reinforcing mechanisms of surveillance, control and power, and maintaining structural inequalities through control of the ‘production of knowledge’ (Foucault, 1977; Habermas, 1984; Adorno, 1997; Huhn, 2004).

What role does e-learning play in this process? Drawing on the results of over a decade of researching, developing and evaluating e-learning approaches, systems and services (examples of which are discussed below), the following key issues are highlighted:

- The domination of ‘human capital’ models in the design and implementation of e-learning

- The absence of a ‘societal learning’ agenda

- The pervasive use of the ‘linearity’ principle

- The de-coupling of e-learning from the ‘life-world’ and from ‘life opportunities’

- Cognitive exclusion

- The role of ‘technical coding’

THE ‘CRISIS OF LEARNING’ AND THE HUMAN CAPITAL APPROACH

It could be argued that the real starting point for a review of the current role of e-learning in addressing social inequalities and exclusion is the proposition that learning itself is in crisis. It is in crisis because the overall ‘learning patrimony’ that has shaped the European learning agenda, its institutions, its curricula, its pedagogic methods and tools – is outmoded. It has evolved from a particular perspective – the ‘human capital perspective’, which has its roots in ‘industrial capitalism’. For over thirty years conceptions of the benefits of education have been documented by human capital theory (Schultz, 1961; Becker, 1975). Although the shift from an industrial to a knowledge society has been clearly recognised in policy circles, ‘new’ Lifelong Learning and e-learning models are primarily updated versions of the original human capital paradigm. In Higher Education, for example, current state of the art points to the emergence of a ‘new pedagogy’ based on ideas of ‘performativity’ and ‘customer-orientation’ (Usher, 2001; Bagnell 2001). E-learning is being used not to expand horizons of knowledge and creativity in higher education, and to improve access for ‘hard to reach’ groups, but to support the re-structuring of the higher education enterprise and improve its efficiency and effectiveness. Many analytic studies of higher education suggest that instrumentality, usefulness, adaptability and ‘fit’ for the existing system have become the dominant values in discourse about the aims of universities (Brockbank and McGill, 1998; Barnett, 2000). Pioneering examples of ‘virtual campuses’ like the Open University of Catalunya, whose original ‘mission’ was strongly focused on improving access to learning for the ‘hard to reach’, are evolving into consumer and service-led organisations aimed at promoting marketable skills and supporting the needs of industry. The example of the UK e-University provides a spectacularly salutary lesson. A UK Commons Select Committee recently described the initiative – which closed after barely a year of operations - as "an absolute disaster". The body was set up as a joint venture between the government, which put in 100 million euro, 12 universities and private industry in the shape of the technology company which was to provide the software. But it failed to attract the hundreds of thousands of students it had hoped to. Just 900 had signed up by the time the funding was cut off, putting the amount spent on each student at around 63,000 euro.

It is probably a cheap shot to point out the obvious lesson to be learned from the fate of the UK e-University – that technology doesn’t necessarily provide cost-effective learning. A more significant observation is that the ‘new pedagogy’ embedded in its mission, and its design, did not attract sufficient learners. It could be argued that, on the one hand, it failed to address the needs and motivations of users but, more broadly, that the ‘human capital’ agenda it followed was inconsistent with the diverse and complex patterns of ‘lifelong learning’ in post-industrial society, and with the need for a ‘societal learning’ agenda. Although both ‘individual’ and ‘social’ benefits of education are acknowledged by its adherents, human capital theory has tended to emphasise individual rates of return. This theoretical framework has also asserted the primacy of economic rationale for educational investment, often from within a narrowly vocational (individual) perspective (Steedman and Wagner, 1987; Prais, 1995). Yet the case for the adoption of both a ‘social learning’ pedagogy and an economic model that recognizes the wider benefits of learning (including its impact on social exclusion) is surely overwhelming. Essentially, the influence of the human capital model in shaping e-learning agendas, systems and services has led to the domination of a highly individuated vision of learning, focused firmly on employability and ‘reproduction’ rather than on ‘transformative learning’, and based on a singularly ‘linear’ notion of learning as seamless transition pathways from school to higher education to work to professional development. Yet, as recent Eurobarometer data on lifelong learning demonstrate, for the vast majority of people learning happens as part of everyday life. Moreover, their learning needs are episodic, rather than progressive or linear. Life-course theory and research, which has attracted a resurgence of interest since the mid-1980s, as a result of contemporary youth problematics, has looked closely at macrolevel changes in advanced society and the processes of individualisation observed by Giddens (1994) and others. This evidence suggests that youth transitions, formerly seen as involving a distinctive set of processes, are contextualised within the broader study of transitions and social change across the life course as a whole. This is a reflection of the rising permeability in modern society of what were in the past traditional boundaries between life phases (Chisholm, 1999). An improved understanding of youth transition, Chisholm suggests, demands a reconceptualisation of the social life course that dispenses with linearity and unidimensionality. The term patchworkers which has entered the vocabulary of policy makers has some relevance here. It signals a changing recognition that the lives of many people will not now fit the expected patterns of biographical structuring, and indeed that the skills and competences acquired through improvisation and bricolage may have a new relevance in modern society.

SOCIETAL LEARNING

Reflecting these realities, current state of the art in pedagogic theory and practice has been characterized by the emergence of ‘social’ approaches to learning (Eraut, 2000); an emphasis on transformative learning rather than reproduction (Engestrom, 1996); a focus on interactivity rather than ‘transmissive’ methods in developing skills (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Dale and Bell, 1999); the importance of ‘collaborative dialogue ‘ in learning (Freire, 1972) and the role of ‘sensemaking’ and ‘communities of values’ (Weick, 1995; Ciborra and Lanzara, 1998). Yet this kind of thinking has yet to make an impact on how e-learning systems are designed and implemented.

The dissonance between the conventional human capital paradigm and emerging thinking about how learning operates in ‘post-modern’ society is beginning to be reflected in calls for alternative pedagogic models that can accommodate the plasticity and reflexivity of the ‘knowledge society’. Stephanie Marshall, for example, compares the dominant learning paradigm to a ‘clockwork’ model. The school curriculum is shaped by notions of measured, time-bounded, mechanical chunks of learning. Yet this paradigm, and its underlying pedagogic philosophy, is out of step with new theories, mainly drawn from the natural sciences, of chaos and complexity theory (Marshall, 1999), and also from organisational theory, with its emphasis on ‘complex systems’ and ‘turbulent environments’ (Miller, 1996). It follows, argues Marshall, that Lifelong Learning – and by extension e-learning - should be conceived of as an ‘adaptive system’ rather than a ‘clockwork mechanism’.

Further evidence that policy-makers, practitioners and systems designers are out of step with the needs of learners in this post-modern ‘knowledge society’ is underlined by research that suggests that more and more people are interested in what is ‘out there’ beyond the narrow boundaries of school; college; work; the nation and the European Union and, secondly, by research that points to the rapid proliferation of self-help groups and community based organisations using Internet technologies to expand their own knowledge, as a reaction to the control by experts of the production of knowledge (Giddens, 2000). For example, the growing expansion of the anti-globalisation movement can be seen in terms of a groundswell of need to address issues – across all cultural and national boundaries – that are not restricted to debates around jobs, schools and housing, and a reaction to what could be described as an ‘imperialist’ attitude to education on the part of many governments. Manish Jain (2001) describes a visit to the World Education Forum in these terms:

“The total surrender of the vision and meaning of education to the inevitability of globalisation and to the technical expertise of the World Bank…..The starting point of the discussion by all national governments was how to use education to …. beat the competition”.

Against this background, there is no real consensus about whether e-learning constrains rather than enhances our capacity for the re-construction and re-invention of personal and social identity. On the one hand, as indicated above, in successive elaborations of the concept of ‘dialogic reflexivity’, Anthony Giddens has argued that the increasing pervasiveness of the ‘Knowledge Society’ has opened up new opportunities to enable ordinary people to become their own personal ‘social laboratories’, carrying out everyday ‘experiments with the self’, particularly utilising information from the Internet (Giddens, 1991; 1994; 2000). Yet a counter-interpretation sees the emergent Knowledge Society as a form of control, with Electronic Lifelong Learning Records; smart cards and public service Digital TV combining to create a seamless and pervasive ‘web of surveillance’ and a ‘culture of compliance’ (Cullen, 1998). Following Foucault, these examples, it could be argued, reflect the development of ICTs (or more accurately ‘knowledge society technologies’) as ‘techniques of the self’ that are put to work in the exercise of pastoral power, in order to promote the ‘annexation of the subject’ by professionals: administrators and policy-makers (Foucault, 1977).

A further alternative position argues that new technologies neither enhance the power of the state to control the learning agendas and learning practices of their subjects; nor provide opportunities for new forms of collective appropriation of the processes of knowledge production. Instead, new technologies provide a space for individuals to create their own ‘personal panoptica’, enabling them to create an endlessly self-serving ‘hall of mirrors’, that constantly reflects their own self-image; their preferences, dislikes and prejudices – a profoundly individuated social space that is insulated from ‘otherness’ and from external reflection. As Simon Carr put it in a recent newspaper article:

“What a hovel we live in electronically…. It’s too small for civilised life. We are surrounded by ourselves. The world we create is a terrible reflection, with nothing but ourselves in the frame. It’s so childish. It’s a meal of sweets”.

NEW IDENTITIES

A key challenge for the Knowledge Society, and for the e-learning industry, is to understand and reconcile these conflicting, and sometimes paradoxical dynamics – the demand for policies and practices integrating learning with goals like economic competitiveness and social inclusion; the fragmentary, individuated and atomistic nature of the world of surfing and ‘blogging’ – within an essentially societal learning space. This requires a more innovative and imaginative conception of social identity, social relations and social practices than is currently discernible in e-learning policy, theory and practice. The diversity of communications channels available, and the capacity to penetrate personal and social space are enabling opportunities to present flexible identities and multiple personas. As Giddens has suggested, people can now choose ‘lifestyles’ rather than reference groups. We can become ‘auteurs’ of our own ethnographic narratives. From a weblog in Surbiton, Joe Blog can become Joe Black; forty-two year old ex-marine John Doe can blag his way into Tracy Teenage’s bedroom by inhabiting the persona of a Britney Spears fan; Suileman Idris can e-scam me to help repatriate his secret $30 million oil fund from Lagos to a Swiss bank, and Janita constantly invites me – and only me – to view her webcam on www.janita.bz. Current research and policy discourses in the e-learning domain have failed to recognise the emergence of this fluid, multi-faceted; evolving, post-modern identity. They make a simplistic causal chain between information provision and societal change: more information means better informed people which means more responsible decision-making; a richer and more marketable skills set; more active social and political engagement – and a better society. Yet this perspective is highly contested (Facer et al, 2001; Supple, 1999) and the notion that simple exposure to information broadens horizons and lowers social and cultural divides is not supported by the evidence (Selva and Sola, 1995; Buckingham, 1999). A major gap in our understanding in this area is how technologies that promote self-managed and individualistic information-seeking, knowledge management and learning affect social relationships, especially within the context of prevailing political and policy discourses on inclusion, social cohesion and active citizenship. As Turnbull and Muir put it:

"There is the vision of a 21st century citizen living and working in personal isolation, with e-mail, e-economy and internet providing all their information and service needs and the struggle to accommodate this individualistic vision within the concept of an integrated society ...Not surprisingly, therefore, the reconfiguration of citizenship has become an international issue". (Turnbull & Muir 2001)

But the notion of ‘citizenship’ embedded in current thinking about e-learning is also outmoded. If we accept the notion of fluid and flexible identities, then the idea of an inclusive society sharing common goals and values is also discredited. Knowledge Society and e-learning policy discourses present a vision, on the one hand, of personal liberation and self-enhancement and, on the other, the chance to engage in richer, and more rewarding forms of social interaction through ‘active citizenship’ and e-democracy. These policies sketch out a vision of ‘ambient intelligent environments’, portraying seamless and ubiquitous knowledge services, to promote “an inclusive knowledge-based society for all”. In the EU, ICT policy links together a number of highly resonant themes: social inclusion; social capital; social welfare, and ‘e-democracy’– within the umbrella of ‘joined up e-government’. As argued above, a defining feature of these policy discourses around learning, technology and inclusion is the homogenisation of target groups. ‘Excluded groups’ tend to be classified into neat, discrete categories: single parents; long term unemployed; ‘returning’ mothers; black and ethnic minority groups. Such a functionalist portrayal of social exclusion does not sit easily with what we know about how ‘life worlds’ are socially constructed. Insufficient attention has been paid to approaches that focus on the social construction of learning, and on processes of cognitive social learning (Krohn et al, 1985). The emphasis on ‘personality’ profiles, it is suggested, ignores how learning varies in terms of ‘context’ and ‘time’. In reality, there is typically a high degree of segmentation within the ‘community’, and, more importantly a range of ‘reference groups’ individual attachment to which is fluid and determined by changing circumstances (for example ‘public’ and ‘private’ spaces). It is now relatively well-accepted that group membership, identification and behaviour is subject to a continuous process of redefinition and 'social shaping' (Garfinkel; 1967; Festinger, 1957; Blumer, 1969). In other words, target groups are ‘moving targets’ (Cullen at al, 1997). This is linked to what can only be described as a fundamental misconception of how knowledge is created and diffused in society. Conventionally, knowledge production and diffusion is portrayed as a top-down linear and hierarchical process of information flow between three broad ‘constituencies’: experts, practitioners and citizens. The reality, however, is not one of a seamless, “inclusive knowledge-based society for all”, but one of fragmented ‘constituencies of knowledge’. Put crudely, there are two such constituencies – those who work on the construction of the knowledge, and the remaining ‘knowledge underclass’. The first is characterised by sub-communities that are often quite closed and self-referencing. There is poor transfer and transition across boundaries (for example between the various ‘sectors’ of education and training: higher education; schools; adult education and informal learning) of knowledge and its application. The second is composed of social environments - ‘life worlds’ - that typically are alienated both from the ‘knowledge-producing’ communities of expertise and practice, and from ‘life worlds’ outside their own. Moreover, within life-worlds themselves knowledge creation and ‘sense-making’ is, firstly, fragmentary and episodic and, secondly, is constantly being defined and re-defined, through ‘experiments with the self’.

This suggests that e-learning systems need to: adopt methodologies to capture user needs from the perspective of ‘different constructions of reality’, and from the perspective of flexible ‘scenarios of use’ rather than fixed ‘target groups’; develop mechanisms to promote active ‘collaborative sense-making’ between different stakeholders engaged in the learning process, and allow stakeholders to ‘step into each others shoes’; provide for the capture and utilisation of ‘evolving’ knowledge and shared constructions of knowledge; link learning and knowledge production to the conditions of the ‘life world’ in which learners go about their daily lives.

The following are a number of e-learning examples that illustrate these issues. One is the Connexions Card recently rolled out via the Department for Education and Skills in the UK. This offers a hybrid client/server and smartcard technology platform to provide rewards in the form of consumer goods (videos; trainers; CDs and cinema tickets) and transport discounts for young people in return for regular attendance at formal education institutions or more informal learning environments. The idea is to use technologies to ‘incentivise’ education for young people who have dropped out of the education system and those at risk of dropping out. Yet one of the ironies of the innovation is that arguably the most excluded of the target group – the 160,000 young people who have already left the education system – are prevented from accessing the Connexions service because the rules are that you have to be already registered at an educational establishment to participate. Furthermore, evaluations of the service suggest that it is of most benefit to those who need it the least. As one informant from a ‘high-deprivation community’ community put it: getting 10% off your trainers is not much use if you can’t afford the trainers.

The Electronic Village Halls (EVH) initiative – which won a Bangemann prize as a flagship application of e-learning principles and practices in support of social inclusion tells a similar story. It used a pedagogic model imported from rural Scandinavia to inner Manchester to provide ‘learning by doing’ hands on keyboard skills for lone parents and Bangladeshi women. Evaluation of the initiative suggested, however, that it had limited benefits for users. Problems identified included lack of support structures (e.g. crèche facilities) for learners and the raising of expectations around transferable skills that were impossible to meet in the local labour market. In short, the technology was disconnected from the life-world and the life opportunities of the targeted learners.

In contrast, it is possible to identify examples of e-learning practice that successfully link learning to ‘lifeworld’ and which embody a ‘societal learning’ approach. An example is the Digital Learning Ring developed by the Peabody Trust – a housing charity working in the UK. This initiative provides basic technology and a ‘collaborative community learning’ pedagogic model to improve basic skills of people in ‘deprived’ urban communities’; to develop people’s information gathering and information management skills, and ultimately, to improve the capacity and develop the social capital of the community. The DLR and associated ComputerGym provide a community-wide intranet together with a mobile computer ‘drop off’ facility for Peabody residents that takes learning technology to where people need it. At the same time, as part of the associated Digital Learning Ring project, residents can access dedicated videoconferencing facilities and learner support systems (including facilitators) from access centres based on the estates. These also provide support services such as a crèche. The main distinction between DLR and the EVH example is that DLR concentrates on developing ‘meta-cognitive’ skills – i.e. learning to learn – rather than specific market-driven competences. The essence of the DLR is to ‘bootstrap’ the learning of people whom formal education has failed by essentially improving their self esteem; providing them with the resources to plan and manage their own learning strategies, providing them with the means to access and utilise information, and ultimately, improving the capacity and social capital of the community. Further, the learning approach is ‘joined up’, because it is explicitly linked to community regeneration rather than narrowly focused on IT skills.

In a similar example, the regional government of Extremadura – once officially categorised as the most deprived region in the EU – is using ‘open source’ technologies to promote a ‘collaborative knowledge region’. A grid of local ‘knowledge centres’, based on what might be described as ‘significant community focal points’, such as local libraries, schools, community centres and so on, provide opportunities for technologies to be used to develop societal learning agendas. Although re-skilling agendas figure prominently in how learning is carried out, direct economic goals are integrated within a holistic paradigm of learning, which includes initiatives to promote inter-generational networking; health promotion activities; archiving of historical artefacts; environmental actions and e-democracy initiatives.

COGNITIVE EXCLUSION

These examples bring into play another key issue – what might be termed ‘cognitive exclusion’. If we accept that the life worlds of excluded groups are ‘socially constructed’, then this also implies that the ‘lexicon of e-learning’ – its language; structures; models and modes of discourse – is itself highly context-dependent. This in turn implies a dissonance between the communicative practices applied in the construction of learning technologies for excluded groups and the everyday communicative practices of such groups. For example, it has been argued for some time that there is a difference between the ‘elaborated language codes’ adopted by dominant social groups and the ‘simple language codes’ adopted by excluded groups. Whilst this is an over simplification, there is some evidence that both the language of design, and the content language of learning technologies do not mesh with the linguistic and communicative structures of ‘hard to reach’ and ‘excluded’ learners. Whilst a number of research projects have addressed a range of social, cultural, economic and geographical factors affecting access -for example the needs of disabled people; problems of isolated and rural populations (Purves, 2000), cognitive aspects affecting access have remained poorly understood. In this context, the evidence suggests that the text-based information systems that form the basis of much of the learning content provided through the Internet clash with the oral and visual communicative practices of ‘hard to reach’ and ‘at risk’ learners. They typically don’t use text much and are attuned to its limitations, as reflected by the growth of a ‘texting culture’ associated with the growing ubiquity of cellular telephony – especially amongst young people. This culture has its own set of social rules and norms; its own set of identities and its own lexicon – different to that of, say, formal literature . Some recent initiatives are exploring ways in which these ‘cognitive identities’ associated with information technology platforms and scenarios of use can be harnessed to promote a greater degree of social and economic engagement for marginalised and ‘hard to reach’ groups. One example is the ‘m-Learning’ project, an EU funded Information Society Technology (IST) project that is using mobile technology and the ‘texting culture’ to promote collaborative and informal learning mainly for young people ‘at risk’ of dropping out of the education system.

In this example, there is a sense of attempting to reconcile dissonances between different ‘life worlds’ – young people and policy makers; educational ‘drop outs’ and training providers - through the use of technologies that enable people to ‘slip into other people’s shoes’. This process could be seen as one form of ‘collaborative knowledge production’, or what Weick (1995) has called ‘sensemaking’ – the adjustment, enlargement and evolution of an individual’s cognitive map of the world through engagement with other cognitive and cultural constructs. There have been some experiments undertaken in applying ‘presence technologies’ to exploring ‘sensemaking’ and, by extension, exploring the social and cognitive basis of social identity – and, conversely, ‘difference’ and marginalisation (Emering, 1998; Normand, !999). For example, the ‘Coven’ experiment uses virtual reality to explore why some people experience feelings of anxiety and alienation when confronted by ‘alien’ social situations. Other experiments are using ‘games technologies’ to put people into ‘presence’ situations in order to raise awareness of the issues around drugs, racism and crime. An example is the HERO project. HERO was funded under the EU Information Society Technologies Programme to develop and evaluate e-learning and e-health technologies to support more effective rehabilitation for offenders, ex-offenders and young people ‘at risk’ of offending. It used a collaborative, blended e-learning environment to promote what might be described as ‘life-swapping’ between key actors within the prison and criminal justice ‘life world’, for example getting offenders to see crime from the point of view of the public. Combining content management systems with interactive games and video streaming, it created learning spaces that enabled users to put themselves into a ‘virtual reconstruction’ of other people’s lifeworlds; to deconstruct the causes and consequences of criminal actions and to simulate ‘possible futures’. Part of the project involved putting young offenders on the ‘at risk’ register in a London community in touch with inmates on Death Row in San Quentin prison, California. This collaboration helped the young people to envision the most extreme potential consequences of a ‘life of crime’. Using the insights gained from this ‘shared sense-making’, the young people, in collaboration with project staff, developed their own learning curriculum including song-writing, video production and editing and ICT skills. More importantly, evaluation of the project showed that the participants had gained significant ‘soft skills’ including team-working, information management and time management, and had made significant gains in key areas such as self-esteem.

TECHNICIZATION AND TECHNICAL CODING

Finally, no discussion on the role of e-learning in the context of the emergent ‘Knowledge Society’ could be complete without reference to the fundamental nature of ‘technicization’ itself, or more specifically the notion of ‘technical coding’. Technical coding is the process through which inventions and innovations – principally technologies – become stabilised and used in everyday life. Conventional understandings about technology development assume it is an ordered, evolutionary process through which the essential properties of the technological ‘object’ become useful, then get improved and adapted as time goes on. Yet in reality, there are in principle any number of development paths an invention and a technology can take. It is commonly assumed that modern bicycles emerged through the evolutionary improvement of contraptions like the Victorian ‘penny farthing’. Yet as Pinch and Bijker point out, the ‘penny farthing’ was in fact built as a racing machine. From the 1870’s, a vast number of racing clubs came into being whose sole purpose was to encourage and legitimate competition (races, time trials and so on) between these machines. If the modern racing bike does have a lineage, it is rooted in the ‘safety bicycles’ that emerged in Victorian times to provide a less dangerous alternative to the ‘penny farthing’. The point is that racing cycles and ‘safety’ cycles were two different technologies. Although the safety design eventually emerged as the dominant form of bicycle, the ‘innovation space’ in which bicycles developed in their early gestation was characterised by a number of possible innovation scenarios. Pinch and Bijker (1984) call this technical ambiguity ‘interpretative flexibility’. The history of technology development and the history of inventions show us that, in most cases, technical coding will operate in a fundamentally ‘conservative’ way, that is, it will reflect the established social and cultural conventions of a particular time and space. In turn, further cycles of development of a particular technology or innovation will tend to reflect a series of progressive nuances and refinements in design and engineering of the original invention rather than radical re-structuring. Perhaps more importantly, the inherent ‘conservatism’ in the process of technical coding means that decisions about the ‘innovation path’ an invention will take are made by a small group of ‘movers and shakers’. These include: technical experts; politicians and policy-makers; venture capitalists (i.e. people with money and power). Overwhelmingly, user involvement in these decisions is minimal – and the involvement of ‘creative entrepreneurs’ outside the ‘magic circles’ of power and wealth is similarly negligible. A key idea related to the concepts of ‘technical coding’ is that inventions and technologies have ‘civilisational choices’. For example, Feenberg (1996) argues that in the case of the bicycle, issues of design and development were shaped by a ‘contest of meanings’ – between the bicycle as a mass transportation tool; the bicycle as a sportsman’s toy, and so on. At the birth of a particular invention or technology, these social constructions and meanings are up for grabs. There is a relatively short moment of ‘flux’ before the technology becomes ‘coded’ and freeze-framed through the application of standardization and standards. Afterwards, the technology becomes appropriated into fixed modes of production, and it becomes reified through legitimated codes and practices of cultural consumption. Following stabilisation of the technological innovation, the technical code will determine the range of configurations of possible lifestyles that can be associated with the particular technical object. The technical code therefore expresses the "standpoint" of the dominant social groups at the level of design and engineering. E-learning is no exception to this process. It too has civilisational choices. As has been argued above, the dominant ‘civilisational choices’ are associated with: supporting the EU in its drive to become the ‘most competitive economy in the world’; reinforcing globalisation and existing disparities between the first and the developing world; improving the effectiveness and efficiency of the educational enterprise; reinforcing prevailing power structures and structural inequalities.

It doesn’t have to be like this. If e-learning is serious about its role in, and commitment to, social inclusion, then it should promote bold and radical societal learning experiments that match the potential inventiveness of technologies and which could engage citizens – particularly those from the margins – as active co-producers of knowledge, creativity and innovation. Essentially, it could be argued that the real purpose of e-learning is to unlock the untapped potential of millions of potentially creative, entrepreneurial citizens who are divorced from the innovation, knowledge production and learning process. This requires, amongst other things, a shift from reproductive learning to learning as a transformative, creative collaborative knowledge process. To take the example of offending, the cost of keeping people in European prisons comes to 15.9 billion euro per year, excluding the new member states. This figure is simply the ‘maintenance bill’ for offending, and is dwarfed by other costs such as the costs spent on policing, the costs to business of maintaining security systems (7.9 billion euro per year in the UK alone) and the social costs in terms of fear of crime, loss of human resources and skills to the economy and so on. The conventional strategy aimed at reducing crime is to spend a small amount of money on prison education . Yet resources for prison education are constantly being reduced as money is spent on capital costs – essentially building more prisons. This ‘strategy’ is virtually useless since, on average, 60% of all adult prisoners re-offend within two years of release. Meanwhile, the conventional wisdom is that offenders are unintelligent and unemployable. Whilst it is true that a significant proportion of offenders and ex-offenders have low literacy and numeracy skills, a number are highly intelligent, creative and inventive. Suppose for the sake of argument that, say, 5% of any given prison population could be classified as ‘intelligent’ or ‘creative’ as measured on ‘standard’ rating scales. Even if the creative capacity of 5% of the offending population were accessible and useful, tapping into this knowledge pool could prove highly effective, in terms of applying ‘marginal practices’ – the illegitimate skills possessed by offenders - to fostering entrepreneurship. More importantly perhaps, turning a proportion of the other 95% of ‘non-creative’ offenders into active citizens could save billions in terms of the costs of crime and the criminal justice system. As a practical illustration, the Toyota car company has established a track record of innovation by working with what could be called ‘marginal practices’. In the UK, the company introduced a pioneering scheme to enlist the know-how of young offenders convicted of vehicle crimes in designing more effective security systems for their cars. This initiative has since been consolidated through training programmes developed by the company to turn illegitimate skills into legitimate qualifications. As well as addressing the employment problems faced by prisoners, the Toyota scheme also helps tackle the issue of a national shortage of qualified technicians. The success rate has been high among those who have completed their sentences and found employment on their release.

CONCLUSIONS

Underpinning Europe’s strategy on lifelong learning and inclusion is the resolute view that social exclusion will be mitigated, primarily through the application of new technologies. Social exclusion can be viewed as a process in a general sense, in that the paths by which social groups are excluded from material and cultural resources are dependent upon the way in which such resources are actually distributed – that is upon the social structure. Educational expansion over the last forty years has increased educational opportunities but strong evidence exists that it has not changed the distribution of life opportunities for significant layers of marginalised groups who are unable to access the institutional frameworks offering “quality” resources. Indeed there is evidence that technology actually reinforces exclusion. This is primarily because: new forms of technology-mediated learning typically adopt a ‘human capital’ model that is geared towards maximising the efficiency of the educational enterprise and the reproduction of labour; learning systems ignore the complex ecological dynamics, including ‘inheritance factors’, that maintain deprivation and exclusion; they fail to recognise emergent forms of ‘flexible and multi-dimensional identities’ associated with the ‘Knowledge Society’; they create learning environments that are disengaged from the ‘life worlds’ and life-chances of citizens; they legitimate and reinforce existing power structures that control the production of knowledge. As a result, there is little evidence that new ICT mediated learning innovations imply new forms of learning or that they enhance the possibility of extending education and learning opportunities to those excluded from traditional resources. What they tend to do is make conventional forms of learning more efficient and more accessible for more people from already ‘technology literate’ social strata.

Against this background, this paper has attempted to put the case for promoting a ‘societal learning’ agenda for e-learning. Such an agenda implies a radical and innovative approach across all learning sectors. It would imply, for example, a pro-active rather than reactive e-learning mission within the school system, one that thinks about ‘First Chance’ rather than ‘Second Chance’ schools. Instead of using technology in damage-limitation mode, to redress the failings of the system, one could envisage e-learning underpinning an adaptive, multidimensional learning environment, one that isn’t simply a slave to the rigid metronome of the organised curriculum and one that is fully embedded in its surrounding life-world. Then maybe one day, you might be hearing Chesney’s voice over the cabin intercom as you strap yourself into your transatlantic seat.

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

JOE CULLEN was born in Liverpool and studied Social Sciences at the Universities of Durham, Dundee, Cambridge and Birkbeck College, London, obtaining an M.A., PhD and Dip. Psych. After spending some years as an academic, at the Universities of Cambridge, Loughborough, Leeds, London Metropolitan and the Open University, he worked for a brief period as a freelance consultant before taking up a post as Principal Researcher and Academic Dean at the Tavistock Institute, London, where he also serves as a member of the Editorial Board of ‘Human Relations’. Dr Cullen has led a number of large EU RTD projects in e-learning and e-health, with a particular focus on ‘inclusion issues’, including working with people affected by HIV/AIDS, and in the field of offending prevention and offender rehabilitation. He has also co-ordinated a range of research and evaluation studies on pedagogy, informal learning and e-learning. His current research interest cover: skills and competence representation models; collaborative knowledge systems; ‘lifeswapping’ methodologies