Considering the future is widely reckoned to be a useful and productive undertaking, giving groups and individuals confidence in the decisions they take in the present, informing their goals and aspirations and helping them to try to anticipate and respond to change, with some authors calling for a greater recognition of the value of learners engaging with accounts of the future within current curricula (Facer & Sandford, 2010; Slaughter, 2008; Damasio, 2003; Hicks, 2002). There are a number of different approaches towards engaging with the future employed by different sectors – policymakers, corporate strategists, social science researchers, product designers – but they share a common desire to consider the future as open, a need to offer compelling stories of future events or behaviours, and, usually, an obligation to provide an appropriate level of evidence in support of these stories. In many cases, this need for robust accounts of the future capable of engendering confidence in their utility leads to the use of quasi-scientific language and methodologies, borrowing ways of describing and valuing the world from domains that are trusted to talk about future events, such as engineering or economics.

Adam and Groves (2007) describe the social imperatives that lead to this “scientific” approach towards producing accounts of the future, and suggests that they arise from a dominant ideological perspective that encourages us to consider the future as open, unclaimed and susceptible to colonisation: by constructing futures as immaterial and “extraterrestrial”, elites are free to operate without considering the material consequences of their actions. Introducing Bauman’s (1998) description of “the great war of independence from space”, they note that accountability and responsibility are notions that are strongly coupled to territory, and by projecting their actions into a placeless and abstract domain, these elites are able to evade their legal and moral obligations to communities experiencing the consequences of those actions. Castells (2009) describes a similar state of affairs in discussing the “mythical future time” mobilised by corporate planners, and the way in which their work projects the present-day values of the powerful into the future. In both these descriptions, what leaves the future open to colonisation is the way in which it is represented as abstract, immaterial, placeless, remote, general and unconnected to the present we experience and inhabit. This representation of the future positions it as a resource to be exploited, rather than the dwelling of real people to whom we owe the same moral obligation as those existing now (Groves, 2007).

If it is the remoteness and abstraction of futures as commonly represented that works to obstruct positive social action, then, there is a need to discover a way of constructing possible futures that allows people to connect to real, actual places and people. By accepting the immaterial and de-spatialised futures of powerful elites, we abdicate the right to act in our interests and abandon our future lives to those who have different interests to our own. We need a way of representing futures as connected, placed, real, local and enmeshed within networks of being in order to resist these forces.

Drawing on authors in the ecological tradition (e.g., Berry, 1977; Leopold, 1966), who have drawn attention to the need for societies to recognise the value of place and the ways in which elements of ecological systems – including human beings – are interconnected and interdependent, and on writers in the field of education futures (particularly Slaughter, 2004 and Hicks, 2002), this paper develops the notion of ‘located futures’ as just such a way of representing futures.

Located futures are accounts of alternative futures articulated in relation to a particular place: more broadly, they are futures that have been constructed with a sensitivity to the rootedness and located nature of lived experience. Futures are inescapably located – they happen in some place. By paying attention to what might come to pass in a particular location, it becomes possible to recognise the difference between this and the futures that happen elsewhere, offering an opportunity to counter the general and homogenous quality of the dominant futures constructed on behalf of and in the interests of corporate entities, and connecting those who currently inhabit that place with those who are yet to do so.

Subsequent work will describe the notion and derivation of ‘located futures’ in relation to the domain of education, explore the ways in which they might extend our capacity for embedding futures thinking within learning, and consider some practical applications within a learning context.

Recently I keep coming across things (articles, posts) like this, in which people suggest that we could use points and progress bars to help children (never adults, strangely) learn better. People who enjoy games, and have done so for a long time, are the last people who should offer opinions on how games could be used for education, because we’re the sort of people who genuinely like collecting points and achieving targets, and that’s what games have historically tended to be about. We’re an unrepresentative minority: everyone else has known about games for ages but as long they’ve been about points chosen not to join in. If games are going to be used meaningfully in education we’ve got to work out how else they might motivate people, beyond simplistic behaviourist approaches.

Exploring links between music and mathematics in a networked mobile system

This project would develop software capable of analysing the positions of a group of learners relative to each other and streaming music generated computationally using the qualities of the group’s shape back to each learner, allowing members of the group to receive auditory feedback on the shape of the group, and to manipulate the audio stream through positioning their bodies differently in space.

For example, five learners, each with a mobile device capable of broadcasting its location (through GPS, network triangulation or similar), might be the vertices of a five-sided polygon, as imagined from above. Qualities of this shape – the interior angles, the length of the sides, the regularity of the shape, the surface area it covers, the length of time the shape has persisted – could map to musical features – dynamics, frequency range, degree of polyphony, range of instruments, different thematic material, degree of harmony – that could be used by software in generating a musical response.

The software would be designed to enable the precise nature of the correspondence between geometric quality and musical feature to be set by users themselves, allowing learners and teachers to explore the connections between the shapes made in space and the ways they can be analysed to an appropriate degree of complexity, and to represent the relationships between shape and harmony in the way they feel is most appropriate. Regular shapes might lead to more harmonious music; shapes sustained for a longer period might be louder than those that persist only briefly; serendipitous figures might be rewarded with specially-chosen vocal samples; learners might be guided towards target shapes through more attractive or moving musical forms; basic musical rules might be used to chart the stochastic movements of students travelling home, producing auditory geographies of familiar territories: a school song might be written by the movements of a victorious sports team during their final match.

The pedagogic value of this system might lie primarily in the capacity for supporting cross-curricular exploration, the participatory design of learning activities by learners themselves and the opportunities it presents for learning across age groups, with more able or older students preparing geo-acoustic systems for younger students to experience, or technologically more fluent students realising other students’ ideas about the relationships between shape and music.

Additionally, from a research perspective, the embodied nature of learners’ interactions within the geo-acoustic system is modally distinct from more usual forms of interaction with these subjects and presents an interesting and novel set of questions around the ways in which intellectual understanding relates to physical bodies, as well as being an opportunity to foreground current issues in education debates, not least perhaps the opportunity to explore more rigorously popular notions of “kinaesthetic intelligence” and to promote physical activity within an educational context. The nature of the activities designed by teachers and learners might well resonate with current interest in the potential educational value of pervasive and augmented reality gaming.

Despite this interdisciplinary focus, there are a number of traditional subject areas addressed in the development and use of such software. The following list is indicative rather than comprehensive.

• Geometry — understanding the ways in which practical geometry abstracts shape from the physical world and the language mathematicians use to describe geometric shapes and relationships
• Acoustic theory — models of synthesis, tone and timbre
• Music — composition, generative approaches to music creation, music theory
• Computer science — understanding networks, representing and manipulating variables using programming languages
• Psychology of perception — making sense of the world through auditory cues, proprioception and mental schemata
• History of science — Pythogarean notions of order and harmony, and how far these relate to current ideas about the way we understand the natural world to be ordered

Additionally, exploring the possible activities that this software might support could lead to explorations of the ways in which information can be presented through sound (sonification) and the various groups in society who might find this approach to sharing information about their environment beneficial, as well as supporting conversations about sound design in media, noise pollution, the ethics of location-aware software and the ways in which people’s individual actions contribute to larger effects.

I’m skirting an argument with a prominent neuroscientist, in which I feel both of us are slightly puzzled that the other one shows signs of thinking less respectably than we might have thought at first meeting, and I think it comes down to the language we use. Of course it does, you say, and you’re right to point out the triviality of my insight, but it’s important to me to understand exactly where our individual assumptions about the world are being reflected in our speech, and you are not even real. So I am going to try and collect some examples of language that troubles me — that’s all, just causes me concern — so that I stand a chance of understanding our miscommunication and avoiding what would be a disagreeable falling-out, one that would damage me professionally far more than it would them.

The tendency of neuroscientists to use the word “learning” where other people might say “recall” is pretty widely acknowledged, I think (and came up again today, with a speaker from a neuro background).

One of the articles sent to me by the academic first referrred to uses phrases like “…the part of the brain responsible for…” (not going to quote for Google reasons), and this bothers me: using the word “responsible” implies agency, and this seems to indicate some assumptions about identity, mind and body, causality and so on that are, to my knowledge, still reckoned as unresolved by most people who have given it some thought. Far better to stick to the positivist roots and say “..the part of the brain where we see a certain kind of activity when we see someone display this behaviour”.

Actually, this is the kind of things that got Susan Greenfield into trouble at her recent book launch: a crowd of philosophers and theologians and psychologists gently (for the most part) pointing out that for a long time other people have been thinking about aspects of mind and behaviour that neuroscience has only just begun to recognise, and that perhaps she ought to stick to doing very good neuroscience instead of very bad philosophy.

I think it’s starting to look as though my problem lies with what I percieve to be a lack of self-awareness on the part of some neuroscientists, in that the language they use reveals assumptions about the world that for them are unchallenged, and yet to those who have given them a little more thought are far from certain. When they talk about the brain and their experimental data I am enthralled and fascinated: when they extrapolate naively into domains that have been much more thoroughly examined by others they do so with no respect for the traditions of thought that might teach them to be less confident in their generalisations.

Probably better I put that here than in an email. To be continued, I think: there’s something big here to be given more thought.

I’m going to Hack Day!

So I guess I should start planning now. Anyone else going?

I’d meant to write everything up here as soon as it happened, but to be honest, my brain’s full. It’s been overstimulating. Which is always better than boring.

Of course, an idea this welcome can be hard to let go of, and it’s taken me a while to stop thinking that people are trying to speak the same language as me, just because they say they are. In most of my meetings so far there’s been a moment where I start to wonder if I’ve been passing out every few minutes, fugueing violently in a kind of delayed jetlag, consequently missing the information that would make the last few sentences comprehensible. My colleagues here are used to looking at me now in complete bewilderment as I try to make a link between sentences that come after one another but are otherwise utterly unconnected.

So I’m doing some homework. I bought a copy of “English in Singapore” (Ling & Brown, 2005), which is recommended by Anthea Fraser Gupta. (Brown, with Chia Boh Peng, considered whether Estuary English might be an alternative to RP as a teaching model: he’s published hugely, according to google, but so far this is my favourite).

For more references, Roles and Impact of English as a Global Language (Doms, 2003) seems useful, as does this summary from David Deterding (also from the English Language & Literature department at NIE). I’m looking out for English as a Global Language by David Crystal, mainly because I loved Stories of English. I might leave the SAAL for the time being.

This whole are of new Englishes is fascinating : having only encountered the idea in the context of emerging discourses online, discovering its relevance offline at first-hand can’t help but be eye-opening. Imagine that, offline life being fascinating.

Legitimising these new forms of English is a direct challenge to the ethos of the Speak Good English movement, which is either a well-meaning attempt to make sure people from Singapore can be understood outside the immediate area, or “a triumph of the relentless, hegemonic forces of globalization”. Regardless of whether it’s a reactionary echo of colonial orientalism, or a practical effort to help Singaporeans continue to take over the world, what’s interesting to me is that the kinds of speech it identifies as not being “good English” aren’t the bits that cause me such confusion. There are lots of kinds of Singapore English, and I’m fine with Singapore Colloquial English, or at least, I understand why I don’t understand it. My confusion comes from Standard Singapore English. People saying “lah” to intensify something is easy to understand – it’s being kindly asked to discuss on something all the time that gets to me. I don’t know what is that.

I was going to write about meeting Jeff Burke from REMAP at UCLA, and the conversation we had about using the existing network of mobile phones as data-gathering tools to support civic participation, and I will, but I’ve been distracted.

Tune is a game that was developed as part of a course at the Art Institute of Phoenix, in order to give art students the chance to understand the subtleties of tuning game mechanics. In the creator’s words,

Tune is a game about game design, about tuning game mechanics. Besides controlling the game in the typical way, the player must constantly change the balance of parameters against one another. Depending on the current goal, different tunings of the mechanic will be more or less effective. The successful player will be constantly experimenting with the various parameters, looking for the tuning that best equips them to complete the current goal. Each goal brings a new challenge, and may require a different tuning.

I got really lost in the pacing of the game, working out the best numbers to make it so that my pogo-stick thing fell over slowly enough for me to time my jump movements, the best way to make it possible to chain actions together, not controlling my character’s movement around the screen but nudging it now and again to direct it where I wanted. Of course, this only happened a few times, but each time might be the time I managed to make it happen again (almost, but not quite, classical random reinforcement). Making it happen was a particularly game-y combination of skill on my part and the values of the parameters: one of the things I had to ask myself was whether I should tweak the controls when I’d spent time learning to use them in this configuration. A good way to find an hour’s passed in five minutes.

As a game, this might not sound like the most fun ever, and if that’s what you think then you’re not alone:

the core game isn’t very fun, its yet another physics platformer with kind of dodgy control. I know the point of the game is to tweak it to something you can control, but you can’t change the nature of the character, a weird spinning pogo stick that is pretty difficult to control no matter what the physics values are.

It might be that I enjoyed it just because I was really good at it and this commentator was rubbish. More likely, I’m imagining it in the context of a lesson, one that was “was surprisingly fun” and “quickly became a favorite”. It’s a good example of the kind of thing we’ve been discussing, that the context in which a game is played, the expectations of the players and the goal playing it works towards all determine how well it’s received.

Of course, what it also demonstrates is that games are a really good way to learn about game design, which doesn’t help me understand how they might be good for learning about other domains.