Introduction & Scope

• The win-win of working with young people
• How we can communicate & collaborate, locally and globally, easily and safely
• Educational, curricular, cost-effective, environmental and fun!
• easiCOP commumication and collaboration layer
• The tremendous global opportunity!

1 The win-win of working with young people

Our lead educationalist on easiCOP always starts his presentation with three reasons why working between schools and business is so important:   1 Students love it: (quotes) Exceptional learning experience….I will benefit from this experience of working in later life…It’s made my confidence higher…Wow! Just Wow!   2 Learning is so much broader when there are challenges beyond the classroom   3 Learners gain confidence, self esteem and raised  aspirations of future employment

From a business perspective, be it IT supplier or local authority, there are also, in addition to benefits discussed later, at least three reasons for working with young people. Fundamentally, they are very different to adults:

1 They are the technology advisers: they are intensive broadband and mobile users, using our Future technology now 

2 They have spearheaded the move to personal social network applications & devices on a Consumer ‘Free’ WLAN: they force us to re-think the business model 

3 Thinking ‘Free’ offers a tremendous opportunity (as we shall see in easiCOP)

How different these young people are is most dramatically emphasised in a video in which young students learnt to use unfamiliar mobile devices - in how many seconds? Take a peek!

 2 How we can communicate & collaborate, locally and globally, easily and safely 

easiCOP is a global community of practice comprising schools and other organisations dedicated to supporting education and social inclusion for families and communities, adults and children, and individual self-esteem and aspirations.

The focus is Communication & Collaboration, using a mix of the easiCOP on-line support tool together with the easiCOP physical face-to-face. There are three components:

easiCOP Face-to-Face Engagement Process

All of our Hothouse activities are 'one-offs'. However, the common features of Hothousing are:

• Students and experts working together under considerable
• Time pressure, which appears to
• Stimulate creativity and output to go beyond ideas to
• Deliver real hardware or software solutions and, believe it or not to... Have fun!

Take a peek at the young people working with experts on the design of a hand-held device...the iVine! The second video shows a great presentation of the idea! In addition to the sheer experience of working between students and experts, we focus on Communication & Collaboration skills, in particular with sessions on group working using the ideas of Belbin, and presentation skills: 

easiCOP On-line Tool & WIKI

But in addition, we offer the easiCOP on-line support tool (this site ). This allows partners to communicate and collaborate on-line as well as off. The first screenshot shows a multi-media project WIKI page. The second shows the DASHBOARD: This allows a project manager to control the project (registering, who can do what, monitoring, forum moderation, messaging etc):

Together, these allow people to work together in a controlled, secure way: 

Videoconferencing Generic Hothousing Engagement Process

Most excitingly, we can mix-and-match with videoconferencing straight over the Internet. In the first shot we see a live mobile conference between Sri Lankan children, a class in Gorseland, UK…and children in the school kitchen garden! In the second, we see Mujuni on the computer, Internet and Webcam for the first time ever.

Remarkable projects have resulted. But the key question is: What is the win-win?

 3 Educational, curricular, cost-effective, environmental…and fun!

Our lead educationalist summarised the educational learning benefits. Further support can be found in the educational endorsements link on easiCOP.  There isa wide range of possible curricular contributions:

• Knowledge: An understanding of how others live locally and globally

• Skills: Communication, collaboration and coaching skills Using ICT for a purpose

• Values: Becoming more informed citizens in a world where earning is very much two-way

• Cross Curricular: With the new curriculum focussing on cross curricular project based learning, Subject benefits include:

• Citizenship: Knowledge and understanding about becoming informed citizens, Developing skills of enquiry and communication Developing skills of participation and responsible action

• ICT: Finding things out Developing ideas and making things happen Exchanging and sharing information Breadth of study

• Literacy: Speaking and listeningGroup discussion and interaction Range of activities context and interaction

• Geography: Pupils should be taught to study different parts of the world and different types of environments, including their local area

In addition, we have found remarkable qualitative and quantitative changes in children’s perception of both technology (in the below example broadband but it could be a new VLE) and the organisation (in this example BT but it could be the school or the local education authority or...) – which we believe says volumes on how we should involve (young) users in the introduction of technology. The key point is that: Hands-on experience of technology, products and services and working with people and organisations enhances Perception! (It is perhaps obvious when you think about it...):

My expectations before I came here were that the technology would be unreliable and wouldn’t be available until the distant future. But … the technology seemed reliable enough and wasn’t too far away.’ …‘I thought broadband was only a faster Internet connection…’‘I thought that new technology would be really hard to use but everyone found it really simple.’

‘I thought BT was just phones and broadband, but the things I have seen is across a whole range of uses and it is amazing.’ ‘I thought they just did telephones and Internet but they do a lot more’. ‘They don’t just do phones’. ‘Before I thought they were just a phone company’ ‘They now seem to care about peoples’ views and perceptions of them and their technology.’

Even more importantly, we can measure this: Students were all asked questions of the format in the below table. Their answers were scored from 1 to 5 (1 lowest i.e. just phones – 5 highest i.e. much more than phones).

It can be seen from the graphs below that, for the question To what extent does BT do more than phones, the nearly all students had a low or average Perception before the Hothouse experience and an extremely high Perception afterwards.

These Perception shifts can be seen visually: the Perceptions before are in purple, and the post Perceptions in white.  

SO, IN THESE THREE EXAMPLES, INSTEAD OF BT, INSERT YOUR ORGANISATION, SCHOOL, EDUCATIONAL ORGANISATION.....

4 EasiCOP communication & collaboration layer

Brownhills uses easiCOP to extend collaboration and communication both locally and globally.  It uses the easiCOP VLE for both school and (shortly) the local community. There are currently RSS feeds from easiCOP to the VLE and exploration into the benefits of further integration – easiCOP and the VLE use common modules and also the data interface to for example, SIMS.

The introduction of technology is (at least) as important as the technology itself. The previous section described the importance of user hands-on involvement in user perception of both technology and the technology provider, and how we might measure this. The following three pictures show a senior citizen being introduced to easiCOP, three young students evaluating laptops, browsers and iTouch as part of their VLE introduction, and members of the local Brownhills community taking exercise – shortly to appear on their VLE!

In the Brownhills User Evaluation link you can see the students’ evaluation and perception of technology – of considerable surprise to the teacher! 

5 Finally… Why is this a tremendous local and global opportunity?

In contrast to 1^st and 3^rd world, some prefer the descriptions ‘poor world and ‘rich world’ to capture the view that in local communities there are people every bit as deprived as many in the 3^rd world.Our ‘young customers’ have forced us to focus on ‘free’, to reconsider the business model and increasingly deliver hardware and software  of widely different types ‘free’ to the consumer.

(1) This is rapidly bringing others into or near to entering our 1st world. 

The above images show UK citizens from deprived areas…the ‘poor’ world. We have already seen Mujuni from Buhumba, Uganda on a computer, Internet and WEBCAM for the first time ever. This image shows children from Kudawella, Sri Lanka seeing the Internet for the first time ever, with their work on it. 

(2) This is a wonderful opportunity to enhance peoples’ lives – 1st as well as 3rd world – poor world as well as rich world. 

One of our partners remarked that it reminded her of Toyota building 3^rd world bridges and highways so that people might then buy cars. We too, are building communications bridges and highways in what we believe (and are monitored by universities, charities and teachers amongst our community) is an ethical win-win.

In this final image, we see the power of easiCOP on-line communication tool, on which was put work by our local Ipswich UK schools on zero cost energy bike producing electricity to power a laptop. This was seen and adapted by our partner school Katha in India as can be seen in the picture. To our amazement, the zero cost electricity bike was adapted to provide light for a young child to learn to read.

Take a peek: In the first video, we see one of our young Ipswich stars explaining the Bike...then the Bike in the Katha New Delhi School,,,then in a home in New Delhi! India...then providing light in the home!