Dr Derek Woodgate returns to the Pod after 3 plus years to talk about his new book, The Augmented Learner.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
Links
The Augmented Learner (download)
Transcript
Peter Hayward: What happens when you bring together multimedia, experiential learning and foresight into a curriculum?
Derek Woodgate: Firstly, 80% of the responses agreed or strongly agreed that the course increased their level of personal creativity. And that was important. 67% of the respondents felt that mastering the use of multimedia provided the opportunity to stretch their thinking into new areas and new directions. But in fact most of 'em, and this was the bit that really I suppose surprised me is that the future's part of it garnered higher results than the multimedia part. So I went in with thinking that the multimedia was a bit that was gonna drive the creativity, and I came out from the research understanding that actually it was that having to work with the future was seen as the main contributor to their increased creativity much more so than new multimedia. And that was really unexpected.
Peter Hayward: That is my guest today on FuturePod, Dr Derek Woodgate returning to the Pod after 3 plus years away.
Peter Hayward: Welcome back to Future Pod Derek.
Derek Woodgate: Thank you so much. I'm honoured to be back of course. So I'm shocked. I looked it up and found that you've done over a hundred podcasts since I was here last, which was 21.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. You, September, 2021 was your episode 108. Think like a DJ and I do, people who haven't had a chance to hear Derek and his take on the Future and music and various things. It's certainly a fascinating conversation. But yeah, that's three and a half years. What's been happening in the world of Dr. Derek Woodgate
Derek Woodgate: Always a lot happens so I'm not short of something new, but, since 21. Yeah, so I continued teaching at the University of Agder in Norway until a year ago. And also the same applies to the University of Houston. I stopped about a year ago, a year and a half ago. But I still maintain my relationship with the University of Dubai Center for Future Studies. And I'm also still part of the university of Agder team. Working on educational development in Uganda, Ethiopia, and Rwanda.
That's including really adding foresight and training the faculty in multimedia learning technologies. The future of learning technologies and stuff like that. But at the beginning of 2022, I moved to Saudi Arabia to work on the future of the Prince Mohammed Bin Fahd University to bring it in line with Saudi Arabia's 2030 vision.
And beyond actually, because I was looking at 2040. And to also help the development of their Center for Futuristic Studies, as it's called and their projects with UNESCO and World Future Studies Federation. And also they are part of the, actually head up and are involved with the wfsf MENA Chapter and broader actually within the whole region.
Yeah, there was quite a lot of work to do outside of Saudi in that part of the world. Then that move was convenient for me given my consulting projects in UAE.
Especially those with the various ministries and my occasional work for the executive board actually at the Center for Future Studies at University of Dubai. So it's been an interesting time both from an academic perspective 'cause so unlike you, I was relatively new to academics about 15 years ago, while still continuing the work at The Futures lab, Inc.
It's now in its 29th year. Next year will be a big celebration, I assume. Anyway, I finished the PMU project at the end of 2024. And although I'm occasionally asked back, I was this week actually for consulting. I still live in Saudi, that's 'cause my wife's Saudi and I flit between Saudi, UAE and Croatia.
So I've recently been more focused actually on The Futures Lab, Inc’s consulting work globally especially on the government foresight side with a number of ministries and city authorities and thinktanks. And that is also interesting because I'm also playing a pretty major role in the WSFF governance foresight workstream.
We're trying to really build up some workstreams that are influential and can be very focused on very specific areas of future studies so that we can develop new approaches and white papers etc that will support the WFSF and policy making..
Peter Hayward: The thing that caught my attention was you've just brought a book out, The Augmented learner and very generously, it's actually a free download for anybody that's interested, and that was the prompt to get you back on the pod.
Derek Woodgate: I'll go straight into that, but interestingly as that finished, I started a new book called Future Rhythms, which will come out this year, but at the same time, the publisher, because he wanted to make a big promotion asked me to revive, I think is probably the word. Future Flow, which originally came out in 2013 because actually it didn't get so much coverage at the time because the publisher went bankrupt. It wasn't very helpful anyway, but The Augmented Learner. A masterpiece of its time. Now. What can I say? No, it is really came off the back of a massive piece of research.
Not just typical sort of study type research, but more about working with a few hundred plus students across three universities to test whether or not some of the ideas I was developing could actually work. A cross between an academic piece of work and practice, which was great.
The primary goal was to study how to increase creativity and inventiveness by bringing together multimedia enhanced learning, experimental pedagogy, and foresight based programs, so increasing creativity.
Peter Hayward: So how do you research something like that?
Derek Woodgate: Ah, how do you research that? From a pure, background research perspective, one thing I'll say about it is that I suppose because of my lifelong interest in the creative economy, experimental and experiential learning and creation and their relationship to expanding the human experience, but also because all research pointed to the growth of the creative class and the future needs for creatives, and postnornal skills.
I was pretty well, in touch with that part of it and obviously the futures part, but there are lots of areas here that I really had not delved into so much. So it was a bit of a learning, quite a big learning exercise for me too. And I think also one of the other aspects to it, creativity is continuously, consistently identified as the most crucial skill going forward and increased employability. Working with students, it meant introducing a lot of previously less emphasized skills such as managing complexity, abstraction, paradoxes, discontinuities. Convergent and divergent thinking, speculative design, right? That made it exciting to be able to build new courses and test them.
But the way when I started, it's funny this actually, I was more interested in the multimedia potential, influenced by the fact that I was teaching grad students in the ICT Department, but it turned out something completely different in the end.
It also meant that I had to create a structure that would allow me to measure learner progress and creativity. So one thing's talking about it and how you could introduce it and deal with it, but how do you actually, prove you've increased it?
And how do you measure those?
So I started by understanding the affordances of mixed media. I thought that was a good start point, but actually it turned out to be very different. I Started back in 2016. I'd already introduced foresight into transdisciplinary courses at master's level, at UiA and at doctoral level at Georgia State University in Atlanta.
And these included courses such as the future of Multi-Media and Entertainment, Future of Energy, which I also taught at the University of Houston at the time, also the future of learning technologies and systems developing. which also involved me in developing the university’s media and learning labs. I was also part of the university's Global Future Learning Lab, which involves my spreading futures across the university and where relevant with its global partners.
So they actually took to the idea of introducing futures studies, which is the reason they took me on to be fair back in 2014. To take futures studies and drive it across the university, which was a, unbelievable opportunity for me. Yeah. So I became co-chair of the World Learning Summit for a few years for them.
And it gave me an opportunity to curate and bring in some interesting people not those who necessarily relate to typical future studies or traditional future studies, but teach from my progressive culture playbook, alternative tech, and all.
Yeah, merging multimedia/mixed media with future studies and future pedagogy and future workspace needs really provided a clear pathway towards, my desired outcome.
I suppose that's how it was started.
Peter Hayward: I know one of the things you did in the book is that rather than just apply an existing learning system to it. There, as you know it, there are many systems of learning. You created your own.
Derek Woodgate: I did. Interestingly when I started to do the research and I.
The first thing actually I looked at, 'cause I thought it relevant, was to start looking at education for the future, you need to, so I studied the future of work and the changing workforce and emerging and potential skills. I mentioned there were these four areas. So that was the first part.
And then I did an in-depth, understanding of creativity and the pedagogical challenge of how to deliver an increase and to measure it. There was actually quite a lot published on it, and particularly because we have a lot of new insights now on neuroscience and its application in such measurements. Neuroscience was a new challenge for me. After that a big piece of futures research on education and learning.
And then ultimately new approaches to pedagogy and postformal learning.
And then finally I did a deep dive into the changing multimedia/mixed media landscape. So looking at systems and tools and interfaces, and the potential role of artificial intelligence and learning analytics and the learner experience.
So I pulled these four domains together and basically what I came out with was obviously first the gaps, but more importantly I realized that actually I needed to develop, as you just said and test a new learning system.
Yeah. To meet the insights/outcomes I found from that integrated research I couldn't find one system that fully fitted. I thought, this is an opportunity. Hey, something cool here. And actually in the venture, in addition to employing more conventional research, I undertook 24 separate interviews, they are in the book, of course, with world leading experts from my network.
They were really critical to either substantiating, or questioning my findings and pushing some novel avenues of exploration, which I suppose is what I needed to develop a system. Very complicated, and very pretentious of me.
Peter Hayward: For the listeners, can you explain, this learning system,
Derek Woodgate: It was a shift in my original thinking, right? I mentioned that. I was primarily focused on mixed media and its impact on increasing creativity. But then when I'd completed the research, I realized actually there was a need for a new futures-based learning system. And I put, I called it the Living Learning System, which I wanted to test in practice over a few years where, which is the core outcome of the book, of course.
Peter: So can you briefly explain the framework for the new learning system.
Yeah, I can be brief, I'm gonna try as briefly as possible to describe it because I believe your listeners need to know.
So based on the outcomes of the research stage, it was designed to embrace eight interactive pillars. And this took into account three main objectives as its baseline. So, focusing and developing post-normal skills, increasing learner creativity, and embracing post formal pedagogy and my findings on the future of education.
To use a Jennifer Gidley term, of course. She's the first postformal pedagogy lady. And in addition, the pillars were designed to deliver against three main tasks. So structural, strategic and institutional and process methodologies, right? Institution process review together. And the framework was designed equally for the learner, the mentor, and the environment?
So each pillar is described in detail in the book from these perspectives, so I'm not gonna, go crazy about that explanations because they are quite long. So here's a potted version, right?
So pillar one is constructivism based blended learning, moving to Connectivism, which is a theoretical framework by George Siemens for understanding learning in the digital age.
And it basically covers aspects such as shared responsibility for co-ownership and design of the course, teacher learning, learner learning, all these new sort of areas and opportunities for autonomous expression, learning through experimentation, abstract thinking, and its application. And this meant really moving towards competency-based evaluation and then focusing on team and project-based learning.
And I added to that creation and a free form delivery approach. I'll tell you a little bit about that later, but it basically meant you could actually answer any of the assignments in any format that you wanted to. I realized that it was most important that students understood the content and the task and that they could actually comprehend, analyse, reflect upon it and use and apply the information properly.
And I was looking obviously for unique and novel outcomes because we were talking about creativity and the future. So the courses were peppered with experiential and experimental learning opportunities. And so forth.
Pillar Two is decentralized thinking systems. And that's one of my hobby horses.
It's a funny old word, isn't it? This implies a plethora of nomadic thinking techniques, not least rhizomatic thinking. Somewhat out of a chaos dynamic, I suppose you'd say, and aimed at connecting the creator's conscience with their imagination to boost creativity.
So I got the learners really thinking and stretching their imagination. Through ambiguity, destabilization. And forming these deep cognitive challenges and letting them roam in their thinking, unhindered by argument. Trying not to cramp any intuition. So these types of thinking really involve, a lot of inquiry, critical thinking techniques, multimodal communicative actions, or non-linear thinking.
Nomadic thinking requires thinking in meshworks. nets that extend to other nets, close one action and start another, working in the rhythm between the spaces, which enables us to create a new ecology or framework for thinking creatively.
It creates a new ecology or framework for thinking creatively.
Pillar three involves cognitive and social presence, obviously very critical today. And it builds off the idea of the optimized student, right from the perspective of the interrelationship between the learner identity as an individual or team member working with the learner, the learner’s level of scope and agency, and contribution to the learning process. As well as their potential for cognitive and competency growth.
So, it's important here, to note that I had systems, and I'll talk a little bit about them, and learner analytics that allowed me throughout the their courses and all the courses I worked on to actually measure how they were growing and the learner’s potential for cognitive and emotional growth.
When considering Learner identity, in the context of the Living Learning System and focusing on identity, styles, orientation, cultural identity, social identity and performance. And I think it's interesting because social learners occupy a hybrid space, with their user-producer position. That's technologically supported today where social learning characterizes this sort of fundamental shift in agency from broadcast teaching to content generation and, a decentralization of resource provision.
And so, it's quite an interesting and important area.
Then there is Pillar Four: Future studies, so you know about that. Obviously, all the listeners know what that is, but in this particular case it wasn't only about creating courses to teach subjects like the introduction to future studies or change per se, or systems thinking.
They were all part of this Pillar of course, but I was focused on introducing the tenets of futures into other topics, departments and curricula often through the future of…. Themes.
Directing learners to subvert assumptions, to peel away the surface of concepts and revisit values and signifiers all those things that we do, to question recognised truths, explore fresh paradoxes and hybrids and to value multiple perspectives and conceptual relevance. But in subjects and in topics, which were not necessarily, basically futures oriented, right? It allowed me to integrate futures, particularly throughout UIA, within subject matter where students had not been required to think about the future before, which was quite interesting.
Onto Pillar Five. Then there was multimedia and accelerated learning. My interpretation really is about learning from the perspective of “technology in and technology out”, and that means the students are required to learn and experience the characteristics and applications and usability of the technologies. And then you make them use them to create innovative tools and artifacts and environments and delivery systems related to the course and content, while celebrating the values of digital convergence and the fusion of the real and virtual.
Peter Hayward: I'm dying to ask you the question is, and it's a classic chicken and egg question, but is this about designing a learning system to teach a novel set of concepts in as much as it's also teaching people who are now learning differently anyway? So is this kind of the curriculum driven design to try and change people? Or is it a reflection of the people that were doing it, were actually thinking differently, therefore the course had to be there?
Derek Woodgate: I think it's a combination. I think the critical part really was to embrace what came out of the research especially the future education part. So I was looking to fill some of the gaps.
That's the first thing, but it was also, as you say, very much driven by the fact that each student is different. Lifestyles are different today and in my view, I was trying to leverage their intrinsic or learned skills and their learning skills in a way that disrupted how we've traditionally taught things. So I think it brought, you are right, the two together and part of that was putting the learner at the center and ensuring that such technologies provide effective personalized learning benefits as well as improved learning systems and support mechanisms that also integrate with divergent cultures and personalized learning styles.
Pillar Six was on Experiential/Kinesthetic Learning. So most of the students have had a lot more experience now, not necessarily in experiential learning, but moreover, in experimenting at home with a whole lot of new devices and new ways of doing things and so on. Yeah, how do you take advantage of that, right? How, how do you teach them to use their gaming skills for learning, right? Educators need to select experiences that have the potential for growth, interaction and reflection. Such dynamic experiences allow space for experimentation, collaboration and the connecting of the various experiences. Experiential learning should demand a degree of risk, experimentation, internal and external conflict mitigated through small risk strategies, randomness, mutation, adaptation and incredible satisfaction from increased engagement and emergent creation. This pillar introduces design thinking, maker labs and transdisciplinary learning labs.
Peter Hayward: I suppose the other one too is that we, I mean I've been reading, and I'm sure you have as well, there are these horror stories of, coming from educators of the impact of covid, the dramatic move to distance based and remote learning, and people linking it into, the impact of smartphones. On the ability of students to do deep inquiry? Given that your research spanned quite a time Yes. What's your sense on those issues that both that we see universities increasingly pushed to a model of education, which is the antithesis of the kind of thing you are trying to teach?
Derek Woodgate: My view is that, yes, that's true. Depending on levels of students, but overall, my experience is that the whole issue of inquiry in that sense and wanting to do more and, so on and so forth, even though it’s far easier today. It tends to be not necessarily the way they want to go.
Pillar Seven, and you brought me to Pillar Seven. Actually, interestingly, organically, I dunno how you did that. It is about self-directed learning and self-determination. If you change for example, education modes - changing from the teacher-led approach that focuses on content delivery and assessable outcomes to learner-based approach, that's, self-directed, peer, tutor, tutored and cooperative learning and all this type of thing, you are forcing them in a way, to be self-directed even though they don't necessarily like that because at the very beginning they love to have a structure. Give me the assignment exactly how I can answer it.
And so I just, I decided absolutely against that. And my view is that the successful learner, to be a successful learner, you have to take responsibility for your study and development of your own positive personal characteristics, such as intention and determination, courage, and all these sensibilities.
And I believe that learners should create their own story regarding the content, its relevance and that they should be part of determining the approach to the course. And secondly, I think it's a matter of self-efficacy, right? The learner's belief in his or her own ability to be successful in different situations is critical as to how they're gonna learn, right? So providing learners with the opportunity to accumulate the acquisition of capabilities together with continuously updating their competencies and being able to contribute to the program, contribute to the course, knowing they're contributing the course, and seeing the course change as a result of their contribution. I think's it is really important for them to understand their own value in the classroom.
So self-efficacy plays a sort of important role, really. in how learners approach these challenges and set their own goals.
Pillar Eight: Immersive Spatial Narratives
New spatial narratives express the powerful role of deep immersion as a key to
increasing learner levels of engagement and creativity both through the development
and use of multimedia learning tools and equally importantly the inner space and
cognitive state that foresight generates in requiring learners to “live in the future”. It is about transferring the learner into new universes, where one needs to deal with unstructured knowledge in unknown worlds.
Spatial narratives enable us to navigate and explore complex and otherwise difficult to experience knowledge. Spatial narratives achieve this as transformative learning spaces, like AI agent mentored 4D virtual worlds, together with their intermodal components, structural elements, their internal and external processes, and social interactions and encounters. They act as an experiential map that portrays optimal ways with which we can experience and learn knowledge more relevant to the emerging worldviews.
Peter Hayward: But again, and again I'm fascinated that, as you brought all these rich and complex and emergent things together. You also maintain that in the research, you are able to measure outcomes and develop competencies that underlie the things you are adding the pillars, so to speak.
So can you talk some more about the measurability and the competency element? Yeah. So this is not just a philosophical model on the future of education.
Derek Woodgate: Absolutely not.
Let’s talk about how we measured it, because that's quite important. So I know that at some point you asked me about, what courses and where and all this part to it. And another question you had was about how did you understand the cohort, could you measure the students in advance?
And so in the book, the case study predominantly relates to “The future of mobile learning” a course I created and taught at UiA. But the quant and the qual research in the book actually also included students from my 8,000 courses at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Namely the future of Multimedia Entertainment and the Future of Creative Industries. Since then, I've also applied the system at PMU to transdisciplinary undergrad courses.
And with hindsight and a lot more information, I was able to develop very different courses based on this system. So I'll give you three as an example. “Building sustainable societies through transformative technologies”, “Social cultural change and the techno Human challenge”. “Smart cities as a mirror of societal organization”.
So as you can see, these actually contain all the elements we've been talking about, but they are actually framed in a very different way. Rather than just saying the future of whatever it is. So the future's part of it, but it's not designed in a way that the student thinks I'm coming in to do a course that's about the future of this, but I really wanna understand where we are today in my field.
So it's embedded within the course, embodied within the whole process of teaching. So before I construct any programs and particularly courses. I attempt to know the learner's competency skills, personality, behavior beforehand. Now I have to admit that in the last decade this is much easier than it ever was.
And part of that is because we have been moving towards learner centered models and, I'm not the only person obviously working with learner centered models. I had a pretty good start point 'cause there's quite a lot of things happening out there. We're influenced today really by, artificial intelligence, machine learning, social learning platforms, cognitive and behavioral and emotional feedback techniques.
Even the ability to see what's happening on group sharing platforms like Slack and Discord and Yammer and so on. The integration of AI and neuroscience into learning and learner analytics has really taken this process to a fundamentally higher level. And so it's allowed us to develop individual student performance and learning pathways against key criteria and goals set ahead.
Right now it sounds like cheating, but what it means is we can better understand the aspects such as their contribution to things like the effects of metacognitive growth and social psychological adaptation and knowledge acquisition.
As you'll see it in the book, in this case I used a Learner Competency Evaluation that considers, 12 different qualities. This is devised by Robson. By the way, this is becoming a fairly standard process, but now it is not just based on my knowledge of the student's previous performances and reports we have, we can pretest before the semester.
And we have many direct and devious ways of doing that. And we have so much more information already in the university's LRS, (the learning record store). It's a different type of information. It probably actually is closer to the type of information that was available when you and I went to school, when the teachers could actually say things very directly.
Or the bits that were behind our reports that, our parents were unhappy with some of evaluation of our behavior and whatever, right?
Peter Hayward: We used to lose those before they got home. They used to disappear somewhere between the school and the house.
Derek Woodgate: But anyway, so I started the course, this particular course I said was titled The future of mobile learning which had 12 underlying learner platforms which embraced the eight pillars completely. To these I added a) freestyle delivery of all assignments (except for those at the end of each the three main units, Exploring the future, Creating the future, Implementing the future, and the final project,) b) opportunities for constant testing and enhancement of their competencies. c) learner contribution to the course so they can actually see where they were contributing to the course design and progression and d) And they agreed to be part of the agreement of what the assignment assessment criteria would be and how we frame the actual assignments, right?
That's a little bit different to how I’d normally run it, but I treated them like adults. And that it was their course. I've always had this sort of attitude. I always say this is your course, I know this stuff. I don't need to do the course.
So I had that sort of attitude towards it from the beginning anyway, every course, and the course really was constructed in a way that facilitated creativity assessment by means of the, a model called a Creativity Diagnosis Scale Model. And I'll talk about that later. And you could use that and other models to measure creativity and creativity increase throughout the course.
It wasn't just, here's a final piece of work, let's measure it . I was able to, and they knew this, to continuously map their work using these models. And as I mentioned earlier, there were these assertion points, right? These four fixed assertion points, and the rest was all freestyle delivery.
What did that mean, freestyle? They could choose their own delivery format. Anything from their own YouTube video to a blog, to a poem. Really, it doesn't matter. I was only interested in knowing, as I mentioned, whether they digested, analyzed, in depth, understood, reflected upon, and applied the knowledge and demonstrated a high level of originality, right?
That was what it was about, so on and so forth. So they only had three fixed assignments and the final project. One was at the end of unit one. They had to create a video describing the potential role of related emerging technologies as well as the future drivers for the future mobile learning.
Then unit two was to demonstrate mastering alternative thinking. And unit three was to apply experimental foresight techniques and multimedia tools and techniques to create future scenarios for the future of mobile learning for 2030 nad 2035. supported by prototypes, and simulations. And then finally the final project, which was, really exciting.
I think the book actually demonstrates really clearly some amazing outputs from the final projects. The task was to create a future curriculum design brief on any subject, for 2030 to 2035 which had to have future based content, had to have a learning environment, tools, core structure and options, assessment, methodology, teaching methods, future student characteristics, models, roles and stuff with a specific focus on optimized multimedia applications and trans media narratives.
So basically they had to do everything they'd done throughout the course and put it into a context of 10 to 15 years out. And that really stretched them and was very good. So that was the story. And I suppose the differences from that and other courses could really be seen from the case studies in the book, each unit produced some really outstanding ideas.
So we had, fully operational 3D engineering training models created with AR and gamification and stuff like that. An AR teacher. We had a holographic robot teacher. We had intelligent learning playgrounds, transmedia storytelling analysis, fully operable, mixed reality AI agent. Future classrooms, neo species engineering ideas.
We had a holographic tinder, which was everyone's favorite, as you can imagine. A fully interactive immersive 4D biodiversity course for 2035. And that was actually really interesting because it had immersive and interactive earth skills and a reflection on the environmental sciences. Really well done.
And so the main difference really was that these courses made the students project themselves into a third horizon future at all levels and to deal with future complexity. And future complexity as I explained to them was dealing with unstructured knowledge in unknown worlds in a specific topic, right?
The other thing was that the course was transdisciplinary throughout. So the context took them into a variety of other fields, way beyond the actual course topics. And it allowed them to consult with professors and students from other departments and to assess labs outside of the ICT department, by appointment.
Having to think about the future of their own profession made them a lot more engaged. And I'd say really more reflective about their potential future workplace, particularly those aspects around continuously evaluating when to apply human machine solutions and in terms of allocating their intelligent assets and time..
Peter Hayward: I was gonna ask you, Derek, this started out as this nexus between well, teaching people creativity and innovation. I would imagine when you started, you already had a half an idea about whether you couldn't, how you would do it, but.
If we go to the end of the book, at least, how do you now see this? This idea of teaching and creating conditions where people can learn to be innovative. Problem solve and deep thinkers?
Derek Woodgate: I think when I started, I had, been in future studies for 25 years or something, or 20 years at least.
And I'd been teaching for quite a while. And what I, a lot of it's down to observation, right? Two things come out of any teaching depending on where your head is and where your mindset is. But for me, one was. These people are never going be ready for the future if they're going to study the way they're studying.
And secondly, I think that they were lacking in in certain skills or certain skill sets that could really allow them to even upskill into new future jobs and so on. It was worrying for me, really. But I think at the same time, I like to enjoy the unknown. I like to enjoy teaching too.
I think that, this is not just about the learners. This is about us, right? It's about, professors shifting. It's all very fine to talk about how we need to make all these learners shift and be different. But no, it's about us. I think I found myself always surrounded by, and maybe that's part of being a futurist, but around, people who were dogmatic about transformative changes to the system, albeit there was lots of people like Siemens who had done so much work.
I can mention dozens of them. The military, were really advanced in in learning technologies in how to train the military of the future and stuff like that. So there were plenty of examples out there. And obviously, universities like MIT and Georgia Tech and Virginia Tech and Stanford have really good systems, but they're very specific to those universities.
But they've moved very far on, and I just felt that everywhere I'd been working was I don't want to say the opposite to that because it wasn't fully, and a lot of the time they were trying hard to progress, but they didn't really have a singular sort of focus of how to progress. And that was part of this.
And I think what I brought to the table and what this work brought to the table by focusing specifically on increasing creativity was it gave me a framework in which to a study it and to apply it. And you asked me about how did I actually, measure the system’s success or otherwise in the end?
There are multiple theories on creativity. I stuck with, once about the expanded version of novelty with purpose.
I don't expect the ideas to be fully formed. I expect to see progress as movement away from convention. And the course was constructed in a way, as I mentioned earlier, that facilitated creativity assessment by means of this Creativity Diagnosis Scale Model. The CDSM basically involves a 30 item creative solutions diagnosis scale and a reduced CSDS that considers relevance and effectiveness, problematization, propulsion, elegance and genesis.
And I used the reduced version that considers Relevance and Effectiveness, Problematization, Propulsion, Elegance, and Genesis. And I use four really key indicators, Novelty, Resolution, Elaboration and Synthesis, and then Closed or Open solutions. And what I expect most is Surprise and uniqueness, right? 'cause they're winning properties.
I also used the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking and I looked at a lot of motivational aspects of creativity, like empathy and the concept I developed some years ago called personal ambience, which deals with the aspects of creative engagement, increased creative abilities, seen through the lens of immersion, interaction and what we let in, and how do we take it to a new level? And that's really tied into social interpersonal factors that this behavior delivers. And each of the case studies in the book, you'll see that I use these scales and I applied them to evaluate both creativity and increased creativity.
So I could measure from the beginning of the course to the end of the course where I thought the increases took hold, but I could also constantly use these measures against very specific work they were doing. Even when it came down to them delivering a different way, I still put it through the same methodologies.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. And Derek, is it. I know your, in your research you were using university, undergraduate and master's level students, but do you think there are things in this research that are applicable at, K 12 and even earlier, that there are some fundamental ways that you know, if you like it. Students are not age limited to learn innovation and creativity when they're at the adult stage.
This can actually be introduced very early into the whole educational part. Yeah, I
Derek Woodgate: most certainly actually would like to see, not the way I've done it specifically, but the essence of the system brought into play from the beginning, from K literally through 12. And I don’t know if you are aware but I've been working with STEAM for a number of years now, and obviously people like Peter Bishop, he's retired now, but his team have grown, Teach the Future very successfully.
And I think that's a massive, and he's been very successful with a great idea for moving things forward. I think the structure I use though which I had previous experience of developing STEAM programs which is STEM plus the arts for younger students could be equally successful. And that's a separate conversation, but I did a number of events specifically for K through12 rather than at the university level because I believe that's where that has to start. And I believe the, some of the work and most of the work actually that went into this research, particularly this book would be critically useful for that purpose. To be applied at the early stages and the steam work we did, I think really proved that.
And that was, I didn't talk about it in this book particularly, (I'm sure I referenced it), but was very important for me, understanding that most of the students and not actually being taught to think this way. Probably ever. And that's what was one of the complications, right? That was particularly true of the work I've been doing in the Gulf.
So different learning systems such as the LLS require having to deal with abstraction and metaphors, etc. which is pretty difficult if you've never actually been pushed to think in that way. And it's very critica for thinking about the future.
Interestingly when it came down to it, and we actually did the last part of the research, right? So one part is my research to get the system developed, apply the system and actually look at. The second was to undertake qualitative and quant research with nearly a hundred students, mainly from UiA, but also some from the courses at GSU and a few students from UH and I, that those results were really probably what helped me believe I could take this system, to the next level and apply the system in an even more advanced manner.
Firstly, 80% of the responses agreed or strongly agreed that the course increased their level of personal creativity. And that was important. And they gave really high ratings to the system because I did explain what the system was at the beginning, and they were lost completely. But at the end, they understood that the system was driving the course.
73% felt that their ability to deliver in any format was critical for increasing their level of creativity in 60% of the 67% of the respondents felt that mastering the use of multimedia provided the opportunity to stretch their thinking into new areas and new directions.
But in fact most of the respondents, and this was the bit that really I suppose made me proud, is that the future's part of it garnered higher results than the multimedia part. So I went in with thinking that the multimedia was a bit that was going to drive the creativity, and I came out from the research understanding that actually it was the future's part.
The biggest surprise to me was that having to work with the future was seen as the main contributor to their increased creativity much more so than new multimedia. And that was really unexpected.
Peter Hayward: can I ask.
You would've seen the impact this had on students that didn't believe they had the agency to do this kind of work, and you would've also seen the impact of this on people who struggled to learn in traditional educational environments. I'm wondering how this pedagogical approach and openness and responsibility applied on students who may well have either not backed themselves or even felt that they somehow weren't teachable themselves turned out?
Derek Woodgate: I think that obviously in every group and every class, you have students like that, and I think the role of the mentor and their peers, by the way, is to ensure that they're integrated and that's a matter of giving them tasks, particularly on the experiential level that help them shine. So with the experiential learning that is critical to these courses, and this course obviously had a large experiential part to it where they have a role to play and that they understand that their role, it is important that the mentor creates an environment where their skills are valued and that they have skills that the other people don't have.
A good example of this is when we were building the work groups and they had to do so for the work on creating scenarios, we had students who were not particularly technically efficient. The way I put the groups together was to ask the question, who's a great coder for example? And six people put their hands up, group one, group two, group three. I explain that You're not going be with your friends. You are not sitting with your friends. even if you would prefer to. End the conversation. And then, I ask who are the multimedia people here who can actually do animation?
Basically I was able to, more or less, there was some duplication, put these groups together where the people each had a different from one another And one of the differences in the groups were, that there were people who couldn't do any of that, but they were multimedia from the narrative perspective, right?
And they're looking at this course and they're looking at this process, thinking what am I gonna do? I've never learned or I am so bad at coding, or VR design…So what's my job? And then they realized that they were the people that had to write the story and they had to understand how transmedia worked, and they were brilliant and better than the other people at doing that specifically.So I think it's a question really of finding ways of giving people a voice.
The key things that won the day in terms of this research, were a sense of freedom, number one. So feeling that you could not fail or that if you felt you had failed, it was part of the whole learning process, and you were within a group and yeah, they'd have your back and you could do something else.
Self-direction and personalization so that you had a role, you were contributing, as I mentioned earlier. And that you were clearly a very dynamic part of every day of studying in this class. And if it was a 10-day workshop, which we had in the middle of the course you were present and engaged every day. And it took a lot to get a 10-day workshop together. I had to discuss with every other professor how we could fit it in, which is where transdisciplinary learning comes into play. So it means conving the other professors to contribute to the workshop to show how their subjects could contribute to the thinking through a lecture or reading or practical suggestions. And then the “technology in and technology out” was difficult for some people. But finally a lot of those that were not that technology capable stated that it vastly increased their ability to learn tech this way, because they knew they had to apply it. They worked with other people and asked other people, how do I do this? Help me. Yeah. And new friends came out of it.
And then I think the focus on creativity, both teaching and learning, made them consolidate their thoughts about their future professions as did the need top project themselves into the future as a concept.
I think that's why they like the future part. 'cause it actually constantly reminded them, yeah, they're at school today, two years from now or three years from now they're gonna be working and they had better understand what that means. - to work within a team, work on projects, and be ready for the future.
So I have taken the quant and qual research into account in designing new transdisciplinary courses for different areas like architecture and urban planning, and so yeah, it's been an interesting journey.
Peter Hayward: Again, congratulations on the book there. There will be a link to the book on your show page for people that are interested, and I'll remind them it's it's available as a freebie download.
So do jump in. Again, Derek, wonderful to have you on the pod. Thanks very much. You've been on a couple of times now, but it's great to get you back on the pod, so thanks for taking some time out to spend some time.
Derek Woodgate It's my absolute: pleasure. I hope, I'm sure I'm a little long-winded on bits, but just put that down to my excitement.
Peter Hayward: Thanks to Derek. If you are interested in Derek’s idea on teaching, creativity, innovation and curriculum then download the book and give it a read. FuturePod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support the Pod then please check out the Patreon link on our website. I'm Peter Hayward thanks for joining me today. Till next time