Challenge
My challenge is to re-valuate and bring creative use of technology for authentic learning with technology where the technology is secondary to the creative cause. This is my central challenge to modern Educational Technology, in British Schools especially, where STEM has largely pushed digital art and expression out of the curriculum in place of large swathes of logic, coding and robotics with the remnants taken up by lay teachers. Using this Design Thinking process so far, I find that due to the success of STEM across the Educational Technology curricula, student understanding and experienceof technology is heavily weighted towards STEM and away from creative, playful and experimental aspects of digital learning. Media, media creation and the understanding of media as a series of data points as well as a web-based achitecture, is lost on a lot of the learning communities at large. Media in general is such an important piece of modern day life that, once upon a time, it was able to be ignored as a room filling sound from the television or radio. Now, this media follows us and creates a secondary version of us online that children, parents and teachers know very little of its actual ingredients. To highlight this, look towards any digital citizenship curriculum and it is clear to see that there is a good natured push towards allowing students and parents to experience a surface-level understanding of media -rich data channels (Common Sense Media/ Interland), yet there is little to teach them about how media (video/ audio/ text/ imagery/ Interactive) follows us, tricks us and changes perceptions. The questions I would like to follow up on are: How can we build, mix and curate a freely accessible resource to accomodate these ideas? And what would an end-point look like to work back from?