Group and Individual Creativity

Digital arts in the curriculum

Leisure, learning and ICTs

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Exchange, communication and representation

Rebekah Willett, Liesbeth de Block - The Institute of Education, University of London

In examining the communicational aspects of the Animated Debate programme, we decided to focus on motivations behind online exchanges and displays of work. We interviewed children about purposes for online communication, their view of online audiences, difficulties and successes with online exchanges, and connections between online exchanges organised by schools and students' own leisure uses of online communication. To discuss this aspect of the programme, we are also drawing on results from a similar EU project, CHICAM (Children in Communication about Migration), in which migrant and refugee children created videos and put them on a project website for discussion (see www.chicam.net).

Similar to Animated Debate, in the CHICAM programme, there were difficulties with the online communication aspect of the project. Although a certain number of exchanges took place between the groups, the communication processes, as regards the amount, the intensity, frequency, continuity and reciprocity, did not come up to the project partners' expectations. Nevertheless, worthwhile discoveries were made along the way which could be important for future projects involving intranet communication and exchanging media. Different factors affect the exchange of communication between groups, many of which are connected to children’s motivation for such exchanges. In some cases factors inhibited the exchanges and thus decreased the motivation to develop communication, and in other cases factors highlight underlying questions about the motivations for such exchanges.

Internet access

In the CHICAM project, all the clubs had internet access in theory, but in practice this was not always straightforward. This was a major and unexpected issue and took several forms. There was an enormous difference in the type of internet access the clubs had. Several clubs did not have access to the internet in their club locations and when they did it was not broadband. This meant that videos had to be downloaded and shown off the website or that the children had to visit a different location, thus separating the processes of viewing and responding, the processes of production with distribution and response. This also caused logistical problems. The Italian club, for example, had to go to an internet café which proved difficult with the whole group. The Greek club had internet access but not broadband. The UK club worked in a very well computer equipped school while the Dutch club only had occasional access in the headmaster's office. Our experience suggests a need for caution in interpreting official statistics in relation to both educational and domestic internet access. For these reasons the experience of using the site was often problematic.

In the Animated Debate project, the pupils also discussed technical factors which inhibited communication. Several of the students commented on the technical difficulties of sending messages, remarking that their messages had not gone through, or, as one girl (age 14) said, "I sent it, whether they actually got it or not I don't know". The students in the UK were unable to use personal email addresses due to restrictions set up by the school; therefore, the group shared one email address amongst the entire group, and they relied on the educator for access to the account.

Clearly this changed the whole experience and took the control away from the children thus lowering motivation. The lack of immediacy and connection affected the communication. In light of the rhetoric about access to the internet, especially in schools, this problem illustrates graphically what some of the actual issues are on the ground and the need to determine what access really means. But this has another dimension which involves how media and new media are perceived and what expertise is available.

Expertise and orientation

A major issue here is the orientation of the club work and the experience of the media educators, the researchers and the children with using the internet. In the CHICAM project, many of the children had very little experience of the internet. In some clubs they had heard about the internet and its possibilities and they wanted more immediate chat possibilities than were available in the project. The researcher in Italy remarked:

They thought they could make just-in-time contacts, get immediate replies, know other groups quickly, and download videos fast. They thought it would be more of a game. This turned them off our web site.

This remark has echoes in some of the students' statements on the Animated Debate project. The students in the UK had extensive experience of using the internet for communication, therefore they had different expectations of how an exchange might happen. The email system controlled by the educator was a step backward in terms of the students' uses of technology, given that they all regularly use the internet for synchronous communication (through instant messaging facilities) as well as for asyncronous exchanges through personal email and message board exchanges. One girl described the email exchanges with the Polish students in comparison with instant messaging: "we need to wait until we can check again and receive it. Through instant messaging we can just talk straight away". This girl went on to remark that a more immediate communication exchange, such as an instant messaging system, would have been a better way of communicating with their Polish counterparts, because they could "chitchat" and "get to know them and stuff".

However, on the CHICAM project, the Dutch partner sees the issue as more to do with the media:

Structural problems relate to the fact that making movies and Intranet communication are two very different things. However, watching productions from other clubs brings these together and we have experienced that this can work! Besides, producing is much more fun and they came to have fun.

The students in the UK club saw the potential benefits of watching productions from their Polish counterparts. One girl said she would be interested in "seeing other people's work and how their work varies from our use of the same software". And a boy commented, "if we're stuck and they see ours they can send us comments to make ours better". However, some pupils questioned the relevance and practicalities of communicating with children they don't know from so far away:

why do we need their views when we have everyone around us, and I doubt you'd be able to send something that big over email quickly and you'd have to be understand Polish

it'd be better if they'd be with you (to give comments) and then if you do again they could say that's not how I meant

The students all insisted that enjoy the process of creating a project rather than having a finished project, and some students said creating finished projects put too much pressure on them and took away the fun. They also indicated that they would prefer to share their work in progress and receive feedback as they went along, rather than putting finished products on the website and then having to go back and revise their work. As one girl described, "when [a project] is in the making [it's more fun] because then you can actually ask them for their opinion and then you can edit it rather than having to when it's finished you have to go back and edit it all. It's just a load of hassle basically."

This raises questions about the motivation behind online exchanges. If an online project intends to act as a display case for students' work and allow for and encourage peer-to-peer feedback on finished products, perhaps the project is not matching the interests of the students. However, it would perhaps be overly ambitious to envision a project which seeks to display work-in-progress and develop communication on various levels, both formal instructive feedback plus informal "chitchat". The CHICAM project concluded that it was difficult to balance production with communication and to allow children to experiment with and explore both these elements, especially given constraints of time and technology.

The burden of representation

In the CHICAM project, the partners found a strong feeling in several of the clubs that the children did not want to be speaking as refugees and/or migrants. They did not want to focus on their immigration "status" and how they might be perceived as "other". Rather their interest in communicating with the other clubs was to find similarities in the here and now. The overriding concern was to make friends in the place they were now living in. This meant both with children in their own diasporic community but also with those from other, including majority communities. Thus, making contact with children in other countries was initially interesting and had a high curiosity value but seemed remote from their everyday "real" lives. They were not interested in investing in these virtual connections in the longer term. This highlights assumptions often connected to school exchange programmes, including penpal or more recent email exchange programmes, regarding motivations behind these exchanges.

Like the children in the CHICAM project, the UK Animated Debate students expressed initial interest and curiosity about their Polish counterparts; however, they saw their main audience for their visual work as closer to home. Students mentioned wanting to put their animation work on their own website to share with their friends or to show their family their work through the project website. Furthermore, they too were unsure about how to represent themselves and had misgivings about how their representations would be read.

The students discussed what they had displayed on the Animated Debate website for the "My Yard" project as representing a mixture of strong ethnic identity and their identity as teenagers:

I took some pictures of Asian food and Islamic shops, the house of our Islamic you know the caba we took pictures of that because that represents us and we took pictures of cars to show what we like...

However, when these same students talked about the exchange with Poland, their curiosity was marked by a degree of naivety and exoticisation. After expressing interest in "finding out what people are like and how they see things" these girls remarked:

I don't think anything we do is like theirs 'cuz their world is completely different to ours so they might, don't know they might find it nice or interesting or even weird.

Yeah, we'll probably find theirs weird they'll probably find ours even weirder.

Issues raised by the findings

These findings concerning communication are important to consider as schools and youth groups increasingly try to capitalise on new technologies and draw on students' interest in peer-to-peer communication, as is strongly evident in their use mobile phones, instant messaging and other online exchanges. The CHICAM project considered four main areas in which, in hindsight, they would have approached the communication between the clubs differently. These areas apply equally well to the Animated Debate project.

The project was very ambitious in its aim of combining both the production of videos and the internet exchange. This meant that in some clubs the emphasis was more on production than on communication. We needed to change this emphasis and focus more on communication. There are ways in which we could have staged and modified this emphasis. Initially the communication could have been with simpler visuals using digital still cameras for instance.

Several of the partners felt that the project website needed to be more child-oriented. We could have included a website design phase in which the children experimented with their own designs and these could have been incorporated into the final version. Children could have had their own pages and there could have been some more playful elements to the main pages.

In order to address the issue of needing more direct communication we could have experimented with audio messaging using voice and music and organising direct time chat rooms that some of the clubs could use. This could have overcome some of the problems of having to write but it would not have addressed all the language issues.

Wider local participation in the clubs could have addressed some of the concerns of the children about being labelled as well as their need to build local friendships. This would have been difficult within the terms of the project design. However, incorporating different forms of local participation might also have added useful dimensions to the inter club communications and offered a more differentiated view on the processes of integration and cross cultural communication.