The evaluation of GridClub 1

The evaluation of GridClub 1

The evaluation of the GridClub educational website for 7–11-year-old children, which we carried out during 2001–3 with funding from the Department for Education and Skills, provided us with a policy-driven prototype of innovative practice. GridClub took its name from the National Grid for Learning initiative which spearheaded the introduction of the Internet into English schools. It was established by a partnership of Channel Four Television (4Learning), Oracle Corporation and Intuitive Media, on behalf of the UK Government, with the aim of extending children’s learning opportunities beyond the school day as part of the

national drive to raise standards. GridClub 2 contained a portal with an extensive suite of resources, and ‘edutainment’ games covering all the areas of the National Curriculum; and a password-protected ‘clubs’ site, within Oracle’s well-established Think learning environment, where children could contribute articles and respond to activities, as well as sending e-mails and ‘stickies’. Key features of GridClub were its design and ‘branding’ with a Meccano-like surround and brightly coloured images to make it attractive to young children; and its status as a ‘safe site’ for children, protected by means of schools taking responsibility for authenticating

50 Understanding innovation individual children’s identity before they could become a member and be given a

password. GridClub was designed to provide a form of supported, curriculum-led but informal learning for children. The support took two forms. One was through the design of the games, reference materials and activities provided and the other was through children’s participation in a series of clubs, with adult ‘mediation’.

Knowing from experience that we were unlikely to be able to gather suffi cient data by on-line questionnaires, and wanting in any case to be able to talk to children and their parents rather than relying on written responses, the evaluation design included six ‘key informant’ schools. These were not intended as sites for case study but locations where we could talk to children and their teachers and, if possible, their parents. However, it soon became clear that the local, physical contexts of use were having a major impact in mediating the affordances of the virtual environment, so in some senses we were unavoidably looking at six individual ‘cases’ with some further variations between homes. The impact of classroom contexts was stronger than might have been expected because the security procedures placed teachers in the position of gatekeepers to GridClub. Initial habits of use were, therefore, established when passwords were issued and the site demonstrated, either in ICT lessons in the school’s computer suite or in computer club at dinner time or after school.

Researching children’s ‘informal’ learning with GridClub offered us a rare opportunity, within government sponsored research, to defi ne learning broadly rather than seeking to measure impact in terms of students’ attainment in national tests. Data collection was focused on key indicators of learning identifi ed in the research literature: interviews with children to elicit stories of ‘fl ow’ experiences (of intensive engagement) while using GridClub (Csikszentmihalyi 1996); analysis of children’s contributions to the ‘clubs’ area of GridClub, and interviews with teachers and parents to identify constructions of childhood (being or becoming) (James and Prout 1997); and concept maps of ‘being in GridClub’, similar to those used in the ImpaCT2 evaluation (see Chapter 10) to identify the nature of children’s participation in a community of practice while using GridClub (Lave and Wenger 1991).