Media and Learning conference live update

Last night at midnight I arrived in Brussels for the Media and Learning conference 2013. The conference takes place at the Flamish ministry of education and the lunch was suitably exciting. Unfortunately my hotel is not in a very nice area but it’s warm and dry and this morning it only took 15 minutes to walk to the conference. I got lost on the way but in end it was really my fault that I did not see the major signs!

I was scheduled to speak this afternoon at 3:30 and so I had plenty of time to go to talks, meet people and tweet! I really enjoy chatting with people online as the conference goes on and I think this is something that I picked up last year at the conference of the Chaos Computer Club in Hamburg. Online people make friends much easier than in real life- although I don’t really have any scruples to go up to strangers and say hi at conferences, either. Tweeting, I made a new friend and connected to lots of interesting people in the media literacy area.

The conference has a coherent strand of ‘media literacy’ and much of what is said centres around this topic. It is fascinating to see how even after years of talking about media literacy, theorists and practitioners from all over the world still seem to take many different things from media literacy- in the opening talk media literacy was defined as ICT, film and online media by three different people.

One of the people who opened the conference was Baroness Beeban Kidron, one of the co-founders of Filmclub UK. I was very surprised to see that she simply explained the Filmclub model and praised it. She is a very engaging speaker and I am sure that she wanted to introduce everyone to her project on a positive note, however saying that media literacy is now playing a big part in schools over the UK and not mentioning that Filmclub does not actually exist anymore annoyed me a little bit.

Filmclub and First Light have now merged to become Film Nation UK and the old organisations are going to disappear. Her comment regarding the media literacy in the schools is simply idealistic- England has removed all traces of media from its latest primary curriculum and in the secondary sector more and more schools cancel media as an A-Level and GCSE because of the move towards the English baccalaureate.

In the afternoon, I went to a lecture on ‘big data’ and the impact of data gathering and analysis on education. Dai Griffiths from the University of Bolton began his talk with a quote from Michael Gove, in which teachers are encouraged to collect and generate data to ‘show what works’. This is very much in line with the approach of my PhD: the education department wants statistics and quantitative ‘proof’ of what makes a difference to learning (or rather testing!). Dai talked about how companies like Wonga and Google gather masses of data and how this data helps them to make decisions but then also noted that this might not be the right model for education.

What data can we really gather as educators? At the moment, all data that we collect or that we are supplied with is about exam results and standardised attainment levels. Does this reflect learning? If you have read a few posts on this blog you might have realised that I feel very strongly about how little testing and grading contribute to education and that much of the education system in which we work is based on the wrong foundations. Dai finished his talk with the question whether using more data (and the trend is developing that way) can really help students and teachers or whether the benefit is just for the managers and data becomes just another inflated tool of performance management.

At 3:30pm it was finally time for my talk. I was part of a panel which spoke about media literacy as a contributor to ‘core competence’ and the two other panel members introduced a practical project and gave a further introduction to Filmclub. I think the beginning of my talk might have sounded a little bit angry- all fired up from the ‘big data’ talk, I passionately argued for the importance of quantitative research and against the casual use of quotes and bad methodologies. I introduced everyone to the City of Film media literacy project and shared a few data points I have gathered so far. I also spoke about the political landscape in the UK and the fact that there was little funding for enquiry and little government support for media. Overall, I think it went pretty well and there were almost 20 people there who listened to me and my colleagues.  Afterwards, I was approached by a lady from the University of Barcelona who wanted to interview me for her film and we agreed to meet tomorrow morning.

This evening, there is the show for the Media and Learning awards. I was a judge for the competition as few months ago and looked at eight media projects from films to interactive software and video games. I am looking forward to seeing some of the other projects which have been nominated. I think there is a group from Yorkshire, too!

Tomorrow, I am going to attend sessions on research into film and media across Europe and one of my new friends, Julie Smith from Southern Illinois University is going to speak about reality TV shows. The plenary at the end of the day will look at how to create systematic change towards a more media friendly education system- something I am particularly looking forward to! Thanks for reading and I’ll keep you updated!