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Learning in the real world. Home of the VIEW Project
VIEW Multi-User Edition
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Origins of The VIEW Project
The VIEW project grew out of the need to develop more and effective education business links. The following paragraphs are a short summary of the history of the project.
The need for the VIEW resource grew within Countec, an education business partnership in Milton Keynes. The concept was developed and specified by Chris Monk the then Development Manager for Countec. He was previously a teacher of Mathematics and ICT in Colchester in Essex and later became an advisory teacher for ICT within the Milton Keynes and Buckinghamshire Technical and Vocational Education Initiative, (TVEI). The TVEI project provided Chris with an insight into education business links and the ways in which ICT could be used to enhance this activity.
The ability to satisfy the demands for access to businesses by education, through traditional means, is always in doubt. Partially, this is due to issues which include;
Health and safety
Confidentiality
Geographic location
Businesses too busy, not busy enough, too small, too large.
Increasingly schools find it difficult to take a group of young people out on a visit to an employer because it puts pressure on curriculum time, it is too expensive in transport, staff cover and insurance costs or simply requires too much bureaucracy to be worth it!
The demands of the 14-19 curriculum add the extra burden of young people gathering considerable quantities of information in support of specific work related learning courses, such as the Applied GCSEs. A visit to an employer for an hour or two alongside perhaps 20 – 30 other students doesn’t always provide the depth of information needed by the student to achieve a level of attainment that they are capable of.
Chris developed the VIEW concept as a ‘virtual visit’ to sit alongside the traditional activities between business and education such as work experience, teacher visits, employer visits, industry days etc that were being supported by Countec. VIEW was to provide a way in which the student could find themselves in a real work place with an ability to move around a site and discover work based evidence for themselves. The workplace was to be real, the evidence real – not ‘graphically changed’ or ‘dummed down’ but real and plentiful. It was too include panoramic views of workplaces they would never get to visit, images of objects, machines, processes and people, interviews with employees where they controlled the interview, hundreds of real documents, posters, leaflets and short pieces of video and narrative with facts and background information.
From a detailed specification, that Chris produced, it was necessary to build a software application tool for the project to enable future VIEW applications to be developed. A local multimedia company was chosen to work in partnership with the project to make the concept a reality. The MK based ‘Virtual Viewing’ constructed the software that enabled the VIEW project team to construct the first VIEW applications. The software built by Virtual Viewing provided an ‘authoring’ component allowing the VIEW project team to build each VIEW themselves without starting again each time and incurring expensive programming and graphic design time. They also constructed the common ‘front end’ through which young people would ‘browse’ workplaces as the project developed. Virtual Viewing continued to provide technical assistance to the project and are themselves involved in the innovative development of multi media and online services. Checkout www.virtualviewing.com to see the range of their work.
With a grant and help from the South East England Development Agency (SEEDA), six employers volunteered to be ‘virtualised’ into a VIEW application. These were BAA Gatwick, Ford, Costain, Eli Lilly, Dover Coastguard Station and Stoke Mandeville Hospital. Skillsmart, the sector skills council for Retail also commissioned a VIEW of Retail based at House of Fraser in London’s Oxford Street. The businesses were identified by the education business links organisations across the south east and were very supportive in allowing significant access to their workplaces. The VIEW ‘applications’ appear as CD based software offered as single user applications free to all schools in the south east of England.
The project outgrew the Milton Keynes Education Business Partnership and separated from then organisation early in 2005. For further information about Countec checkout www.countec.org. Chris Monk began a new ‘not for profit’ business called FutureVu to host the project, complete several VIEW applications and consider the future for the project.
Chris Monk says ‘The VIEW concept was too restricted by operating within Countec, which is necessarily limited servicing the local MK area and supporting rather more traditional activities, it needed to break free to challenge the ways by which young people communicate with the real world, using technologies closer to the lives of young people themselves.’
The project hosted within FutureVu now enjoys the freedom to continue to develop new VIEW applications and may at some point in the future move, as a resource from CD, to the web.
The South East England Development Agency has funded the construction of six VIEW applications. All six will be provided on CDs courtesy of SEEDA to schools in the South East of England free of charge.
Skillsmart, the Sector Skills Council for Retail has funded the construction of a VIEW of Retail CD based on House of Fraser, Oxford Street. The CD is available free of charge to all schools in the UK through their local Education Business Partnership.
