Researching ‘learning lives’ – a new agenda for learning, media and technology

In this article, my co-author Ola Erstad and I revisit the history of our interest in the term, ‘learning lives’ in order to explicate the meaning(s) of the phrase and to set up a series of challenges for research into young people’s learning. We suggest that a learning lives perspective depends on three areas for investigation. First of all is the challenge of how to capture, theorise and describe the travel and trajectories if researchers are truly to ‘follow’ learners through, around and in their learning across everyday life. Secondly, it means refusing what seems to be the most apparent levers of change, namely media and technology. And thirdly, learning lives approaches need to address the pedagogicization of everyday life and the schooled society. Learning lives approaches help us see the changing place of the meaning of education and institutional pedagogies across all the nooks and crannies of everyday life.

The full article can be found here. 50 free copies can be downloaded here.

Learning with Creative Technologies in Armenia

I have just spent the week visiting the TUMO Centre for Creative Technologies in Yerevan, Armenia. I was asked by the Asian Development Bank to design an evaluation of TUMO’s work with a view to measuring its impact on learning, economic growth and society in general. TUMO is an extraordinary achievement offering a mixture of online self-directed learning programs and production workshops in filmmaking, web design, games production and animation but also offering courses and workshops in drawing, music and robotics amongst many other creative opportunities. It reaches about 7000 young people per week and has already set up satellite centres in three other places across Armenia. Its Facebook page gives a hint of its range of activities and energy.

I spent the week watching the centre at work and meeting staff, young people and other stakeholders. In the context of a challenging post-Soviet economy and education system and in a small country – albeit with a large and active diaspora – TUMO represents an extraordinary beacon for change.

I gave a public lecture on  Learning, Technology and Democracy and an interview for a local web-based media outlet which can be seen here or on Youtube here.

From playful learning to playing with learning: Rules, carnival and anarchy

I gave this talk at The Playful Learning Centre in Helsinki, Finland. I argued that although play has  always had a role in many theories of education and child-rearing,  we now seem to live in an era where playfulness, especially in the form of games, penetrate many  aspects of domestic, civil and  social life. Perhaps because of this, play in schools is now a highly serious and formal demand which has found its way into the range of digital toys now being bought by  parents for their children. I tried to mock why we take play so seriously in education and argued that  educators need to find a way to constantly stay close to the edge in a world becoming more hidebound, controlled and constrained.

The Last Mile: Remaking the Pathways to Opportunity

I participated in a webinar, discussing  how to think about the world that young people are transitioning into, how we might begin to develop a research agenda and conversation that addresses the challenges posed by the ongoing shifts in our society and economy?  The CLRN has framed this challenges as the “Last Mile”, a reference to the ongoing struggle to connect learning (wherever it happens) and schooling to real world opportunity, especially among youth from resource-constrained schools and communities.