Figure 1 (top).
Ian Miller and John Cook (me, right) circa 1984. Hammersmith and
Fulham Playbus Scheme HQ
Overview:
I am a
gamekeeper's son who has travelled a long way! From using Logo driven
robots with young people in the early 1980s (on the Hammersmith and
Fulham Playbus Scheme), to leading a project in 2012-2016 that
developed technologies to support informal learning in the
workplace
(as part of a European project).
For example, in the latter we developed an app with help from Chris
Chalkley, the founder of the Peoples Republic of Stokes Croft, for
urban regeneration through culture, activism and risk taking. This
post takes a personal view. In fact, I am slightly ashamed to say
that I unconsciously hid my northern roots and accent when I joined
full-time academia in the 1988. My personal story tells me that for social mobility, we
need to foster a common language, or common ground, that sows the
seeds for building wider understanding of digital and AI tools that takes in: ethics, social mobility and
justice, literacies, competencies and power. We also need to scaffold
hands-on partnership with AI tools.
Keywords: Personal
story, Digital literacy, AI literacy, social mobility, hierarchy of
accent, Zone of Possibility, social justice
Comments welcome
I am a gamekeeper's
son who has travelled a long way, both figuratively and literally. I
lived in ten different places up to the age of fourteen. It all started when I was
nine months old, in early 1959. Dad got a job as a farm labourer and
moved Mum and I from Leeds in West Yorkshire to Newmarket in Suffolk.
Here Dad eventually became a gamekeeper. The new home was an
eight-sided house with a chemical toilet outside and no running water
at first, we used a pump. Mum was far from impressed as she had my
nappies to clean. Fast forward, I gained a degree in Computing
Science from Sheffield Poly in the 1979; Mum and Dad at this point
were running a pub and restaurant in West Yorkshire. From 1984-6 I
worked part-time on the Hammersmith and Fulham Playbus Scheme with
Ian Miller (Figure 1 above) coaching the use of the programming
language Logo. This involved us carting ZX Spectrums around play
centres and youth clubs in West London. As Ian put it in a 1984 Your
Computer Magazine article (Bond, 1984, also Figure 2):
"Logo is useful
for learning about graphics and programming by the back door, without
[students] realising that they're doing it. It's good for handicapped
kids - teaches the[m] about direction and length and space".
Figure 2. Paul Bond
(1984). Computer Club. Your Computer Magazine (July), p. 43. That is
Ian Miller in top photo, top right.
The idea was that
young people could be encouraged to learn graphical drawing in a
hands-on way by using programmable Turtle robots that drew shapes on
the floor. This approach is based around Seymour Papert's
Constructionism, which advocates discovery learning. Basically,
students actively use what they already know to acquire more
knowledge.
This experience eventually contributed to my career as academic and research professor of people centred technology for learning. But, I am slightly ashamed to say that I unconsciously hid my northern roots and accent when I joined full-time academia in the 1988. Instead, I chose to project the arty, musician, middle class values I had picked up from rubbing shoulders with creative people whilst in Camden Town in the early 1980s (squatting and generally being an indie musician). Indeed, a survey by the Sutton Trust (2022), conducted by academics from the Accent Bias in Britain project, has found that one in four have accents mocked at work. The BBC (2022) have summarised the report:
"The Sutton
Trust found 46% of workers have faced jibes about their accents, with
25% reporting jokes at work. An entrenched "hierarchy of accent"
caused social anxiety throughout some people's lives, researchers
said. They said those with northern English or Midlands accents were
more likely to worry about the way they spoke".
Travelling from
being a gamekeeper's son, via indie music, to being a professor does
give a personal story of the social mobility that seemed possible in
the 1970s & 1980s. However, Lee Major (a professor of social
mobility at the University of Exeter and Sutton Trust Chief
Executive), in a recent Guardian opinion piece (Major, 2026) talks
about ‘reverse discrimination’ and declining levels of social
mobility that seem to be happening today:
"No, private
schools aren’t victims of ‘reverse discrimination’ – and
Cambridge should know better. It seems Trinity Hall’s plan to
target elite schools sends the message that privilege equals talent,
when the reality is that poorer students are already on the back
foot."
"It is little
surprise that battles over talent are intensifying at a time of
declining levels of social mobility, widening wealth divides and an
increasingly detached and powerful elite. Yet the profound
generational opportunity divides we face seem beyond the scope of
today’s politicians, many of whom would not now dare name, let
alone challenge, a class system in which advantage and power are
being systemically hoarded by elites".
"For others,
this is a classic case of what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu
would term "misrecognition": mistaking polished performance
and extra preparation, which is so often shaped by privilege, for
greater underlying talent – and sincerely believing this to be
fair."
The Sutton Trust
(https://www.suttontrust.com/) has a mission to improve social
mobility through education. I intend to review their work and will
post about it later. Bourdieu's work (on cultural and social capital)
is of interest, and this crops up in my ZoP work. Indeed, one of
Major's important concerns about social mobility reminds me of work I
did whilst an academic on the ZoP or Zone of Possibility. My open
access paper on some of this work was written with colleagues Yishay
Mor and Patricia Santos (Cook, Mor and Santos, 2020; cited by 97 so
far); it contributes to learning tools design discourse by drawing on
work that has been conducted into what I call a Zone of Possibility
(ZoP). I define a ZoP as a place where individuals can overcome the
constraints of expectations and power structures to effect desired
change. The paper is presented as 3 cases (EU funded Confer project,
ZoP Stokes Croft and Google Lens in HE) that were used to provide
insights to explore the concept of the ZoP. Confer comes from our
work on the Learning Layers Project (http://learning-layers.eu/),
which was
funded by the EU FP7 programme and developed technologies
to support informal learning in the
workplace, specifically in the
healthcare and construction sectors. See Figure 3 for an overview of
the second case study that included the Peoples Republic of Stokes
Croft: Urban regeneration within the Zone of Possibility. See also
http://results.learning-layers.eu/scenarios/zone-of-possibility/. Our
implications (Cook, Mor and Santos, 2020, p. 1156) for practice
and/or policy was that bridging an understanding of social context
will include an undertaking to develop “low flying” or “low
overhead” mediational tools that address ethical and privacy
concerns of citizens but that also sit easily in users’ learning
cultural and work practices.
Figure 3: overview of
he second case study: Urban regeneration through culture, activism
and risk taking. Get in the Zone of Possibility and make stuff
happen.
In my last lecture (Cook, 2022), at Goethe University in the Summer of 2022, I looked at 'AI in learning, leisure and work: ethical considerations'. In this course I helped undergrads build their own Chatbots (this was all pre-LLM, Large Language Model, AIs like ChatGPT) and I also got them to use Google Lens, an AI driven image recognition technology. I also went on to highlight that a key question for me in terms of social justice was: who are the invisible winners and losers? This remains true today in 2026. I believe digital and AI literacy needs to be mainstream and yes the stakes are high. For example, consider these recent examples/issues (the list could go on):
- X's Grok represents the use of AI to harm women
- Fears of LLMs like ChatGPT: "its potential to spread misinformation, facilitate cheating in education, replace jobs, erode critical thinking, perpetuate biases, and create over-reliance, leading to loss of human autonomy; some also fear it might develop human-like (even malevolent) traits, while others worry about data privacy and AI's unpredictable "hallucinations"." (Source Google AI!)
- Fears about AI in the Arts and music. For example Paul McCartney thinks AI could "rip off" artists by using their work without permission to train AI models.
- Generation fears of social divide: "Warnings of a “big split” in society between people who grasp how AIs work and are able to control them – challenging their increasing role in automating decisions in areas including housing, welfare, health, criminal justice and finance. On the other hand, there could be a cadre of AI illiterates who risk social disempowerment" (Booth, 2026).
How do we make the winners and losers visible? First we need to foster a common language, or common ground, that sows the seeds for building a nuanced understanding and broad dialogue around: ethics, social mobility and justice, literacies, competencies and power. And, we need to scaffold hands-on experience of using these tools.
I have avoided discussing the extensive literature on data, digital and AI literacies and will post about this down the line. AI raises many other concerns that I have dodged, particularly the 'singularity' idea and smart weapons. I still feel that the ZoP offers a grounded analytical tool that remains relevant for looking at social mobility and learning. Just like the Hammersmith and Fulham Playbus Scheme that Ian Miller championed, I also believe in getting your hands on tools and actively learning in partnership with these AI tools; in fact I once came up with a design principle for this.
References
BBC (2022). One in
four have accents mocked at work - survey
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-63494849. Accessed 2024.
Bond, P. (1984).
Computer Club. Your Computer Magazine (July), p. 43, accessed 14 Jan
2026,
https://archive.org/details/your-computer-magazine-1984-07/page/42/mode/2up
Booth, R. (2026).
Generation AI: fears of ‘social divide’ unless all children learn
computing skills. Guardian, 5th January. Available:
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/jan/05/generation-ai-fears-of-social-divide-unless-all-children-learn-computing-skills.
Accessed 14 Jan 2026.
Cook, J. (2022).
Lecture - AI in learning, leisure and work: ethical consideration.
Faculty of Educational Sciences, Institute for Social Education and
Adult Education, Goethe University Frankfurt. Available from:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/366685183_AI_in_learning_leisure_and_work_ethical_considerations
Cook, J., Mor, Y.
and Santos, P. (2020). Three cases of hybridity in learning spaces:
Towards a design for a Zone of Possibility. British Journal of
Educational Technology, Vol 51 No 4, p. 1155–1167. Available from:
https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjet.12945
(open access).
Major, L. E. (2026).
Opinion. No, private schools aren’t victims of ‘reverse
discrimination’ – and Cambridge should know better. Guardian,
Available:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/10/private-schools-reverse-discrimination-cambridge-university-trinity-hall,
Saturday 10 January. Accessed 14 Jan 2026.
Sutton Trust
(2022).Speaking Up. Social Mobility. Written by Erez Levon, Devyani
Sharma, Christian Ilbury. Available from:
https://www.suttontrust.com/our-research/speaking-up-accents-social-mobility/.
Accessed 2024.