Group and Individual Creativity

Digital arts in the curriculum

Exchange, communication and representation

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Leisure, learning and ICTs

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

Children taking part in the Animated Debate project reported a wide variety of experiences with digital production tools. Most children said they were avid communicators, using instant messaging and/or email. A few children reported using Flash and Photoshop in school and in their homes. Several children mentioned web design and web scripting as leisure pursuits, and one boy mentioned developing alternative platforms as a favourite activity. (Interestingly, very few of the children reported doing animation.) This high level of engagement with digital production tools is reflective of the recruitment for the project - in one school a competition was held to determine who would work on the project (therefore targeting pupils interested in digital technology), and in the other school pupils on a specialist graphic design course were recruited.

Although the skills and experience of these pupils may be higher than average pupils, digital production is on the increase, especially if one adopts a broad definition of production to include email, instant messaging and blogging as well as activities such as web-design. In their UK-based study, Livingstone and Bober (2004a) report that with children who go online at least once a week, 72% send and receive e-mails and 55% send and receive instant messages. In a study of US teens, the Pew Internet and American Life study reported that 92% of those surveyed had sent an e-mail and 74% had used instant messaging (Lenhart et al., 2001). Looking at other less private activities, there is a growing body of research around teenagers' online productions, particularly homepages and weblogs. Although the UK Children Go Online survey found that only one third of the young people reported having tried to set up a webpage (Livingstone and Bober, 2004a), and Facer et al. (2003) describe setting up homepages as an "exotic" activity, with only 9% of their sample reporting having done web-design, other research indicates there is a growing number of blogs and homepages produced by teens, especially teen girls. Indications are that there are well over four million people creating blogs (an increase from fewer than 100 six years ago) (Henning, 2003). Research shows that at least half of all bloggers are teenagers and half are women (Herring et al., 2004), with one study proposing that a majority of bloggers are teenage girls (Orlowski, 2003). From the results of this research, we can confidently say that children and young people's engagement with production opportunities offered by digital technologies is in on the increase; therefore we might ask how children are viewing these opportunities.

Learning and self expression

Projects such as Animated Debate which incorporate digital design and online communication might usefully draw on children's leisure activities and interests. As mentioned above, several of the pupils were already active digital producers, and several of the pupils mentioned wanting to take part in the Animated Debate project in order to learn more about digital design. After completing the project, one pupil discussed wanting to design games like the ones he plays on the internet, "I like looking through [the games] a little bit more, see how the games are structured and see if I can actually try that out on Flash". It is significant that pupils are connecting their leisure interests (in this case, game playing) with production opportunities, and more importantly with skills being offered in schools.

The UK curriculum sites digital technologies as offering "new tools and new ways to publish, present and communicate meaning". On the Animated Debate project, the children in the UK describe the "My Yard" theme as chance to use visuals as a form of self expression. This girl explains:
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, and people to show how we are

Another EU project, CHICAM (www.chicam.net), reports on the importance of digital technologies for self expression, particularly amongst migrant children:
The editing and filming process offer young people, and especially those excluded from conventional kinds of communication more complex forms of expression, interest and challenging modes of communication. This can be used to reflect upon and to order complex experiences and can be combined into individual products often utilising a high level of aesthetic and artistic ability.

Visual communication

On the Animated Debate project, visuals, in particular, were seen by the pupils as offering a wider range of expression than written texts, and for particular concepts, such as "conflict", animation was to seen to offer another level of expression. One boy described, "if I animate [conflict], it would give people much more sens...to show how it could be seen in a much more easier and less serious way".

Bearne and Kress (2001) describe how different modes of representation offer different "affordances", that is, different possibilities for use and engagement. Children are described as having a natural inclination towards recognising the multimodal nature of texts and the differing affordances of various texts. Bearne and Kress write, "Children, it seems, follow the inherent logics of the modes: they use image for representing the spatial arrangements of salient elements in the world; and they use speech-like writing for representing the temporal arrangements of significant events in the world" (p. 91, original emphasis).

In some cases the Animated Debate project allowed children to draw on the affordances offered by visuals and animation. However, the interviews make it clear that the visuals the pupils chose for the conflict theme in particular were guided not so much by an inner source of self-expression as by internet search engines. Although the images were chosen to match text written by each pupil, the choice of images came from "google" or "cordis" image searches. One boy recounted how he searched for images of "violence" and then chose from the google results. Another boy discussed using a particular cartoon character because he thought it would be easier to animate than other images. Although using images from the internet allows a sophisticated level of image production with minimum effort which is highly motivating for pupils, the choice of images is determined and limited by the search engine. The final mode of representation (animation, for example) also determines pupils' choices. This also relates to written text - one boy said he chose to write about conflict in the form of a limerick because he was told it needed to be a poem and he thought limericks were the easiest form. This highlights the need to consider how "choice" is perceived in digital design projects, particularly if educators are trying to explore multimodality and self expression as discussed above.

Audience

One of the important aspects of digital projects is their accessibility to wider audiences. All the children interviewed expressed interest in sharing their work with friends and family, and in several cases with the whole school. One pupil wanted to put her project on her personal website. Another pupil explicitly said that he saw his friends as his main audience, because he was using images that they would think were "cool". Audience is a key aspect in production, and imagining a real audience outside the educational establishment can sometimes be highly motivating for students. Obviously, for educators, pupils' desire to share their work in this way has implications for the format of finished projects. The pupils comments about sharing their work with friends and family through the internet, particularly their desire to put work on personal websites, indicates that children are viewing new technologies as offering means of ownership for their work. Pupils who discussed their own websites are obviously accustomed to feeling ownership for their work, but school projects are often construed as being produced only for the teacher or for an imagined audience.