Leading & Managing Educational Technology
Playing to the gallery
By Terry Freedman
Wed, 26 Sep 2007, 23:03

The National Curriculum for Information & Communication Technology in England and Wales, and its equivalent in other countries, makes it clear that students must be able to amend their work for different audiences. Unfortunately, there is little guidance on what an appropriate audience is, the general consensus being that what matters is the size of the audience rather than its makeup. This is not only nonsense, but does students absolutely no favours.

In this article we look at:

Why audience matters.

Who is the right audience? (And how to reach it.)

This is closely related to an article about comments.

Why audience matters

Audience matters for the following reasons:

First, it provides context. In other words, one of the aspects by which a piece of work is to be evaluated is its fitness for purpose. You cannot use that criteria entirely unless you know the intended audience. In fact, there are two aspects of fitness for purpose: an absolute one, and a relative one.

The absolute aspect is summed up in the question: "Does this do what it purports to do?". For example, does this interest calculator spreadsheet accurately calculate the interest payable? If it doesn't, or it gives incorrect results, it cannot be said to be fit for purpose, regardless of the audience.

The relative aspect is summed up in the question: "Is this suitable for the intended audience?". If the spreadsheet (to continue with this example) is intended for use by financial non-specialists, but is peppered with financial jargon, then it fails this test.

Second, it provides an incentive to "get it right". Basically, if you're doing something just for yourself, you may be tempted to take a "that'll do" attitude, whereas having an audience can bring into play emotions like not wanting to let others down, and not wanting to let yourself down in other people's eyes.

Third, it can provide a source of comments. Comments are covered more thoroghly in another article, but for now it is worth saying that comments have to be from the right audience, manageable, and useful in themselves in order to be worth having. Comments are, in fact, a form of assessment for learning, and should therefore meet the criteria associated with that type of assessment.

Fourth, in many forms of accreditation the student has to demonstrate the ability to take different audiences into account.

Many bloggers seem to take the view that all that matters is numbers: the bigger the audience the better. This lack of discernment and discrimination is both disappointing and, more important, damaging to students' potential achievement.  It is essential to make students understand that there is a right audience, and a wrong audience.

For example, if you instruct your students to create a technological solution to a real-world problem faced by a local business of their choice, the right audience is that business, not the whole world! In a less extreme example, if the assignment is to create a story using only 6 photographs, the right audience is potentially much broader, but still not infinite. In fact, I would argue that if the audience turns out to be thousands of people, the assignment was poorly defined in the first place.

Let's take that digital story example. What is the point of it? If it is to see how creative students can be, perhaps the right audience is lovers of English, which is far too broad. A much better approach would be to set the context: let's say, instructions that have to be understandable by someone whatever their language, and which have to posted in a small space, hence the use of only a few pictures. So, where might this apply? Telephone kiosks; cameras; a computer. By defining the context you start to define the audience, and that makes it more likely that any feedback will be useful.

To conclude: the assignments you and your team set should be closely defined, in terms of audience and context, even when the assignment is open-ended. How to do that will be covered in an other article.

© Terry Freedman Wed, 26 Sep 2007