I have completed two pieces of work for Beyond Current Horizons. managed by Futurelabthis is a DCSF programme trying to imagine the future of Education through a series of research-based activities.

The first essay is located within the theme of Markets. It explores the relationship between the IT industries and the education system with a view to understanding how the mix of private sector interests and public provision might influence one another in the future. It considers the issues involved in looking at the role of markets in education and theorises the relationships of IT industries between and across education sectors. It draws the shape and structure of the IT marketplace in education looking at current trends. It then examines market drivers and looks at the implied teacher/lecturer; models of technological control versus aspirations for technological transformation; issues of supply and demand and tensions created by the relationship of capital versus revenue funding considering questions of market failure, key policy drivers and some of the issues relating to the differences between the development of open source and commercial growth. The final section explores questions for policy offering levers for change. These include evaluations of and responses to change models, the meaning of our interest in private and public relationships as a binary opposition, the role of the techno-elite and questions of market growth, failure, saturation and normalisation. A concluding section lays out possible directions for future scenarios focusing on the tensions between diversification and integration in the marketplace and an understanding of how this model impacts upon change within the education system.

The second essay is located under the theme heading “Creativity, Culture and Education. It considers the role of context and site in common understandings of learning in general and describes models of learning that exist as complement, supplement or remediation with ‚Äòstandard‚Äô versions of schooling especially those invoked by the idea of informal learning. It then looks at the ‚Äògeo-social‚Äô relationships of learners, homes, communities, non-formal learning spaces, regions, schools, nations and the globalised economy trying to tease out what may or may not change in future scenarios to offer different kinds of learning processes, experiences and activities in all of these domains. The essay concludes by reflecting theoretically on how our dominant paradigm of learning -socio-cultural frames – both constitutes and is constituted by the idea of space, contexts, and sites.