From the newsletter ~ Client Chat with All Saints Anglican School

Jason Wainwright from All Saints Anglican School on the Gold Coast, shares with us his thoughts on good Content.

What does good Content mean to you?
In an education setting, good content is the difference between users responding with ‘attention + concentration’ or its opposite, ‘rejection + ghosting’. I believe many sectors make the mistake of over emphasising new hardware and the freshness of its technology. While this is an important factor, more essential is the content options the tech makes possible. The human mind’s attention span is short – it bores easily and it craves change. Good content captures minds for longer. It is dynamic, intriguing and can take any form – storytelling, data, visual, confrontational, emotional, challenging. Good content is as psychologically, intellectually and creatively capable as its intended recipients are. Good content opens a dialogue.

How does All Saints Anglican School utilise Content in the Wonder Room?
Our content is developed to be audience specific. From the outset, Prendi encouraged us to ensure our tech and the coded programs meant that all our hardware could deliver 1) easily changeable, 2) age + subject area + pastoral specific 3) aesthetically appealing audio-visual content. We needed set piece content they created as drawcards, but the programs we built needed to make All Saints able to rapidly and repeatedly generate new content without extensive training or cost. If content aimed at a year group fails, we discard it and try again. We have been encouraged to place a premium on the aesthetics and depth of our content because it has broad reach in today’s visual age. At Wonder, our content is updated daily.

What do you think is one of the biggest misconceptions about Content?
Potentially it is that the content deliverer is involved in a one-way process of imparting information to a content receiver. It is far more complicated than that: the receiver is ‘reading’ the content with all their life experiences, and that means they are also giving something back to the content. The exchange is indeed a conscious and a subconscious one. We try to use content to drop multiple layers of meaning and message simultaneously – through directed teaching, discovery sessions and through content displays within the room that are never directly addressed but are offering pointed messaging.

Seen any cool Content examples lately that you can share with us?
I’ve been dovetailing large hand drawn murals (with marker pens) with full surround sound HD visual content that utilises kinetic typography. We are naturally drawn to content displayed on the high-tech interactivity of touch screens and AR etc., BUT, we are equally drawn to the ancient arts of artisan like calligraphy and sketches. If content arrests you, it reaches you.