Social learning
Podcast, blog, Flickr, wiki... a growing lexicon reflects the arrival of a web that is built by all of us in a torrent of sharing and do-it-yourself activity. Each wave of pervasive digital technology drives a significant advance in our ability to create and communicate media, as well as to consume it: the first generation brought us desktop publishing and email; we are now well into the second generation enabled by the web; and we are beginning to research the impact of the third - the ambient web.
What we see in the current generation of the web is that people are finding an ever-growing repertoire of ways to connect conversations together as shared media. At one end there are very structured examples such as Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia. At the other end of the spectrum are sites such as Flikr5, where people post photos and create all sorts of strange collections of them by assigning them descriptive tags. เท between there is every sort of variation between formality and informality of content, and personal and shared control, as people explore ways to express themselves and share their interests.
The ambient web extends this by placing all these capabilities in the context of located media. This will transform the way we perceive public space, as it will allow us to create shared meaning by using the web directly connected to day-to-day activities out in the world .The societal potential for this has been explored recently by projects such as Urban Tapestries6 and Presence7, which showed there is an enthusiasm for located, context-sensitive media that is at least as strong as for the conventional web. Two recent projects - New Sense of Place and Mudlarking in Deptford - have explored the learning potential of involving children as active participants in building interactive mediascapes.
The New Sense of Place project8 explored how children could use mediascapes to enhance their geography studies in urban settings. Over a period of several weeks the children created soundscapes (located sounds only, no pictures) that all related to a particular piece of open space close to their school .They were free to decide what sort of content they wanted and to control who it was shared with.
The children responded with enthusiasm and their soundscapes were as varied as titles such as'Evil Footsteps', and 'Secret Super Wood' suggest When invited to think about how they would extend these ideas into their local neighbourhood, they easily generated a wide variety of both playful and serious uses.