Post-ED-MEDIA 08: The Personal Inquiry Project

Back from ED-MEDIA, I wanted to flag up this really interesting ESRC project that I heard about at the conference. It is being conducted by an interdisciplinary team from the OU and Mike Sharples’s LSRI group in Nottingham (standard disclaimer: I’ve previously worked with the OU’s Grainne Conole, who is a key team member, on various CARET/OU projects :-) ). The Personal Inquiry (or "PI") project is designing new educational methods of scripted inquiry learning, and aims to evaluate their effectiveness through a process of scientific enquiry. The curriculum focus is UK Key Stage 3: “Myself, My Environment, My Community”, with emphasis on engaging young learners in investigating their world. Lots more details available on their website.

The PI project is aiming to push the boundaries of participatory design. It is working with groups of children, mostly 11-14 year olds, and involving them in the investigation of issues that affect their lives across a range of settings and contexts: both formal/informal. In this way, the children get to participate in “real-life research”, using a range of new technologies (including the new ASUS PCs) and helping to evaluate an inquiry based learning model developed by the team. The project has taken seriously questions of participatory design and the children are active participants, not simply a “resource” for the project team. I was reminded of a fantastic participatory study conducted for the international children’s charity SOS Kindersdorf, and involving the UEA’s Rob Walker, which invited groups of children in Colombia, India, Nicaragua, and Thailand to consider the question, “What is the meaning of non-violence?”, by photographing their environment.

The team conducted an initial literature review on inquiry based learning, whose standard model follows three linear stages of “predict/test/explain”. They then distilled and synthesised this evidence base to produce a new model, building on the work of Pierre Dillenbourg at CRAFT, and others. Their general approach has been to compile toolkits with specific learning scripts related to the topic, which are intended to guide the learner in making conceptual links across different activities, technologies (e.g. data probes, GIS, blogs) and contexts (school, home, field trips, etc).

Listening to Gráinne’s presentation, I reflected that the idea of involving school-age students in authentic learning and introducing them to working with “rich” data is, in many senses, an extension of the “natural history” approaches of the 18th and 19th centuries. We seem to be coming full circle in our approaches to research and teaching: from the “generalist” and interdisciplinary (or multidisciplinary) approaches that characterised nascent approaches to scientific enquiry from the Enlightenment, to the highly specialised and often technically- or methodologically-driven approaches that have characterised science in industrial modernity, and now back to the interdisciplinary focus. The complex and chaotic problems that today’s generation of children will face in future—the environment, social/demographic change, international security—will surely demand such “multidimensional” approaches.