Education/Business Partnerships (EBPs) have been around officially since the late 1970s, but the extent to which they are embedded in the everyday life of most schools remains limited. Work Experience has been the only systematically assured experience that all school children will have had of a work environment before they leave school.
Individual EBPs have grown and a great number of projects have taken place during the last decade, many under the aegis of or reported by such agencies as UK Schools Curriculum Industry Partnership (SCIP) and Business in the Community (BIC) Until last year however, the use of computer mediated telecommunication capability to support or enable any EBP activity was virtually unknown. Regular polling of agencies with EBP responsibility over the last three years has indicated in nearly every case no inclusion of computer network capability such as email on any agenda of partnership.
EBPs for the most part take place within a locality or community. In his book New Community Networks, Douglas Schuler argues that "Communities are the right scale for many human endeavours....... community computer networks are an important community resource that should be built by the community."
Considering the importance given in recent years to concepts like "Lifelong Learning", "the Community as a Resource", "The Work Related Curriculum," etc., it might seem surprising that little reference has been made to the capability of computer mediated telecommunications as a support mechanism. In one or two instances individual schools in the UK have used email to communicate with their partner companies. Some UK education network providers like Campus 2000 (now Campus World) have hosted some links but usually only for a one day duration. The UK Education 2000 initiative has illustrated some possibilities but EBPs themselves do not appear to have been involved in these developments themselves.
During the last 18 months, Milton Keynes Community Network has been concerned with the creation of a computer network environment that can act as a framework to foster links between education and work environments within the locality. The network presently involves 10 secondary schools, six combined schools and 25 local organisations, all involved to varying degrees.
The rationale for computer supported links has been:
To improve messaging capability between schools and organisations
To give support to existing links
To support developments that would otherwise not have been practicable without network capability.
Central to this rationale is the question as to what extent can curriculum content be given context or validation by making work environments more accessible to everyday student inquiry within a public domain. While staff in schools and organisations remain receptive to this concept, lack of staff awareness of the medium and network access constraints along with curriculum time constraints, have meant that network capability does not readily embed itself within the infrastructure which it claims to support. Community network development requires a healthy level of strategic support and commitment and quickly assimilated evidence of how life can be made easier for its participants.
It is frequently remarked by people external to them, that schools have a low awareness of the difficulties of communicating with staff in them. Teachers are usually only available at break times and these are occasions when limited phone access is more heavily used to phone out. Leaving messages is never satisfactory if the message is important resulting in calls being remade to confirm the message was received. Some local organisations confess to have "given up" trying to ring individuals in schools but these attitudes usually remain below the surface. Teachers hard pressed by other abundant demands may not perceive any urgent need to improve affairs.
Links with the community through EBPs have existed for over 15 year in many UK schools, yet staff awareness of the nature of these links or of the existence of links at all is very low - apart from work experience. Frequently there is little systematic collation of link activity into a school resource that can be accessed by any teacher at any time. Community Network capability arguably arrives against a backdrop of Education Business Partnerships being much thinner on the ground than one has been led to expect notwithstanding some excellent individual examples. These partnerships are not embedded within the day to day curriculum and without some shift in organisational constraints, have little chance of being so. Community Network capability offers a mechanism to make an impact on these organisational constraints though it has to be said at this time, a largely unexamined capability.
Fifteen months ago, a ten year old boy in a local school whilst on-line to the Milton Keynes Community Network during National Science Week, asked a question of a scientist at the Open University "Is a black hole a time machine?" Both question and reply were read by school teachers, students and staff of organisations in Milton Keynes and continued to be read throughout the year by visitors to the Astronomy area of the OU.
The potential role of the Community Network to allow us to be learners together and to find our teachers in diverse environments has been glimpsed but not grasped. There exists enormous scope for teaching and training outside a formal course where groups can come together and make their own contractual arrangements if required alongside more structured course formulations. Developing the community as a resource largely refers to developing people as a resource and will be as much or more to do with fostering informal connections than with the on-line provision of formal courses. It is likely however that both ends of the formal-informal spectrum will support each other.
Milton Keynes Community Network is twinned with Interact, the network of Clarke County Public Education Foundation in Las Vegas Nevada, USA. A number of public areas are shared between the two towns in which there have been some lively exchanges. These include, "Poetry", "Pen Pals", "Technobable", "Environment", "Riddles" and "Links". Many of the types of exchange that occur in these areas are planned but many are not. While police in Milton Keynes have been asked to consider the potential of the network for community liaison purposes, police in Las Vegas are happily on-line with students exchanging views on a number of topics, some directly curriculum related to students in Milton Keynes. An environment project involved teachers and students from both towns and a local park ranger in an exchange of wildlife and habitat comparisons.
The community network is technically supported by narrow-band but we refer to it as a broad band community because the network sits within many layers of existing community frameworks. Once people and groups discover each other on-line they are often quick to make off-line arrangements which then in turn support the organisation of nore on-line activity. The combination of on-line and face to face is a strong one which is hard to replicate or build into national network provision however broad the band.
Peter Davis can be contacted via Email: P.G.Davis@open.ac.uk.