Tim Rudd explains the thinking behind Futurelab's intriguing 'innovation aggregator'
Education Eye is a new, free and exciting resource developed by Futurelab. Offering immediate access to a wide range of up to date and relevant information relating innovations in technology and education, it provides an easy way to discover, explore and share new ideas and information that has been drawn together from hundreds of sites and online sources.
For the more technically minded, Education Eye is best described as an indexed, searchable, content aggregator. Put more simply, expert researchers have identified and linked to some of the best content and sources on the web relating to the innovative use of new technologies in education, so that a wealth of information now appears on just one site.
No longer does the audience have to trawl through numerous sources but instead is presented with an engaging and easy-to-use interface that allows exploration of a diverse set of ordered, browsable and searchable content. Furthermore, this content can also be customised so that you view only the information you’re specifically interested in, which you can then choose to save to your "favourites" folder or share with others.
As technologies develop, so to do the ways in which we find information, connect with others, and research our particular areas of interest. We’re now beginning to see the emergence of some pretty sophisticated, yet incredibly user-friendly technologies that enable new ways of interrogating, finding and posting information and resources with others who share similar interests. For example, can you imagine a situation where rather than having to wade through numerous websites, blogs, twitter feeds and other online sources to find out all the latest information about a particular subject area, it was automatically brought to you in one single place? Well, this is exactly what Education Eye does.
One other interesting feature of Education Eye is the way the site looks and is ordered. Each piece of information appears as a coloured and tagged ‘blob’ or ‘node’ on the screen. As you move your cursor over these they become more prominent, opening up to allow you to read a brief synopsis of the materials and then decide whether you want to explore the full article. As you customise your searches, the digital interface will order information around your own themed areas of interest.
'A diverse range of content and sources you might not have come across'
As one Education Eye user observed recently, “Not only does the aggregation and customisation save you time, it exposes you to a diverse range of content and sources you might not have come across before. It’s also an active resource because it allows you to suggest new links, innovations or sites, and to share information with others so that you can be part of making the community more vibrant.”
The idea for Education Eye was inspired by a range of developments in recent years around innovative and intuitive displays, content aggregation tools and social networking technologies. The aim was to build a resource at the intersection of such developments, enabling the collection, collation, repurposing and re-presentation of content that already existed online, thereby saving significant time and providing some of the best information in a single location, which can then be customised by the user.
It appears that we are currently on the cusp of a new wave of technologies and interfaces that will change the way we search, interrogate, use and share data. They are more bespoke, collaborative, intuitive, and utilise collective capitals to create communities of interest, practice and mutual exchange. Potentially they can help us nurture a culture of transformative innovation by helping us to tap into a collective intelligence, or "cognitive surplus", as Clay Shirky terms it, where the community works together to create a more powerful resource that has significant collective value and application. Maybe that is too grand a claim. However, we can expect to see an increase in these types of tools emerging over the next few years with increasingly sophisticated ways of harvesting, re-presenting and re-using content.
Education Eye, for example, can be rebranded and refocused. In theory there is no reason why this complex content aggregator tool cannot be set up to look at other areas and online materials relating to any aspect of education, or indeed, any other subject area. Its ability to sort, order and make sense of huge amounts of content and present it in an exciting way mean this, and other similar technologies, may represent the next wave of /must have’ digital tools that will help us make sense of an increasingly dense and complex online world. These new developments present opportunities to harness new technologies and reap the benefits of a networked society, enabling us to find more bespoke solutions to educational challenges. These in turn will create a whole new set of digital literacy skills to be mastered as such tools become a fundamental part of our knowledge acquisition.
In the current political and economic climate, with centralised state provision being depleted, alongside a central call for a "Big Society", it may be that such tools will provide the required trusted and shared sources of information that can help fill some of the likely gaps in provision, perhaps even providing more valued sources of information.
www.educationeye.org.uk
Tim Rudd is head of services at Futurelab, an independent educational research and development charity
