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At the Eighth International Conference on Design Principles and Practices, Serveh Naghshbandi presented our initial findings from Maker Day 2013. A short video explaining the day and our abstract below provides more information. Looking forward to your comments, Serveh, Susan and Deb.
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Drawing from the Maker Movement and design thinking, we hosted Maker Day 2013 as a professional development activity for K-9 educators. The goal was to introduce educators to design thinking, making and tinkering. Maker Day was an opportunity for educators to experience fully the participatory design cycle by engaging in the iterative Stanford d.school’s design thinking model. We created a problem scenario and asked facilitators to guide the educators through the design process. The educators used the main scenario in collaboration with each other to gain empathy for the person they were designing. Then, they made one prototype per group, using the materials provided. Prototypes were the solutions to the problems that participants identified and defined. After engaging in the participatory design project, each group displayed their prototype and shared their design process and ideas on how this experience could integrate in their own professional practices.
The knowledge: John Seely Brown
Renowned for his groundbreaking work at Xerox PARC and pioneering thinking on the
interplay between organisations, technology and people, John Seely Brown has had a
significant impact on the knowledge-management world. He talks to Sandra Higgison about his major influences, describes selected highlights from his career and discusses his current challenge to bring joy and meaning back to the workplace.
A New Culture of Learning:
Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change
by DOUGLAS THOMAS and JOHN SEELY BROWN
http://www.newcultureoflearning.com/resources.html
The 21st century is a world in constant change. In A New Culture of Learning, Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown pursue an understanding of how the forces of change, and emerging waves of interest associated with these forces, inspire and invite us to imagine a future of learning that is as powerful as it is optimistic. Our understanding of what constitutes “a new culture of learning” is based on several basic assumptions about the world and how learning occurs:
By exploring play, innovation, and the cultivation of the imagination as cornerstones of learning, the authors create a vision of learning for the future that is achievable, scalable and one that grows along with the technology that fosters it and the people who engage with it. The result is a new form of culture in which knowledge is seen as fluid and evolving, the personal is both enhanced and refined in relation to the collective, and the ability to manage, negotiate and participate in the world is governed by the play of the imagination.
Typically, when we think of culture, we think of an existing, stable entity that changes and evolves over long periods of time. In A New Culture of Learning, Thomas and Brown explore a second sense of culture, one that responds to its surroundings organically. It not only adapts, it integrates change into its process as one of its environmental variables.
Replete with stories, this is a book that looks at the challenges that our education and learning environments face in a fresh way.
ABOUT THE BOOK: THE ASSUMPTIONS
Our understanding of what constitutes “a new culture of learning” requires us to share several basic assumptions about the world and how learning occurs.
First and foremost is the realization that,
The world is changing faster than ever and our skill sets have a shorter and shorter life.
Strategies which resist or even adapt to a constantly changing world are insufficient to keep up. We need ways to embrace change and even enjoy making sense out of a constantly changing work.. Denying change has become a losing strategy.
We need to fundamentally rethink learning and strive for ways to amplify learning and make it scalable.
Understanding play is critical to understanding learning
Play is universally recognized as a critical tool for children. It is how they come to understand, experience, and know the world. As we get older, play is seen as unimportant, trivial, or as a means of relaxation and learning switches to something you do in school where now you are taught. What we fail to fully grasp is that play is the way that children manage new, unexpected and changing conditions, exactly the situation we now all face in the fast-paced world of the 21st century. Play is more than a tool to manage change; it allows us to make new things familiar, to perfect new skills, to experiment with moves and crucially to embrace change —a key disposition for succeeding in the 21st century
The world is getting more connected that ever before – can that be a resource?
Access to information and to other people is both unparalleled in modern history. Our “connectedness” is not only to resources, but to people who are helping to manage, organize, disseminate and make sense of those resources as well. This interconnectedness is creating a new sense of peer mentoring enabled by access to multiple levels and degrees of expertise.
In this connected world, mentorship takes on new importance and meaning
Where traditionally mentoring was a means of enculturating members into a community, mentoring in the collective relies more on the sense of learning and developing temporary, peer-to-peer relationships that are fluid and impermanent. Expertise is shared openly and willingly, without regard to an institutional mission. Instead, expertise is shared conditionally and situationally, as a way to enable the agency of other members of the collective.
Challenges we face are multi-faceted requiring systems thinking & socio-technical sensibilities
As part of what Hagel & Brown call “The Big Shift” change is happening on an exponential scale. This requires our learning environments to match the speed and degree of change happening in the world around us. Our current educational models neither scale sufficiently nor provide a robust enough set of solutions to meet the needs of the current complexities that we face.
Skills are important but so are mind sets and dispositions
It is no longer sufficient to teach skills or even meta-skills (e.g. learning how to learn). These approaches only tell us what needs to be taught, whereas dispositions shift the ground back to learning, grounding education in passion, imagination, and arc of life learning.
Innovation is more important than ever – but turns on our ability to cultivate imagination.
Contrary to popular myth, imagination and innovation are actually spurred by constraints. Too much freedom can be paralyzing, too many constraints can be stifling and we currently have a situation where our classrooms are suffocating and the outside resources (e.g. the Net) are unstructured and unguided (apart from the collectives that form to manage that issue). What a new culture of learning points to is the fusion of freedom and constraint, helping us understand how collectives can provide a sense of institutional structure while enabling personal and individual agency.
A new culture of learning needs to leverage social & technical infrastructures in new ways.
We believe a new culture of learning does this in four ways:
1) By thinking about the problem as a crisis in learning rather than teaching
2) By looking at the incredible power of new cultures of learning that are happening already and understanding what makes them successful
3) By tapping new resources: peer to peer learning, amplified by the power of the collective, which favors things like questing dispositions over transfer models of education and embraces play as a modality of exploration, experimentation, and engagement.
4) By understanding how to optimize the resources (and freedom) of large networks, while at the same time affording personal and individual agency constrained within a problem space created by a bounded learning environment.
Play is the basis for cultivating imagination and innovation
The essence of play is twofold: 1) the freedom to act in new ways which are different from “everyday life” and 2) a set of rules that constrain that freedom. Think of any game a kid creates of make-believe. It is both fantasy and it has to have rules (which may be arbitrary and even ridiculous), but what it results in is a world of imagination and something entirely new and innovative.
It is easy to understand that play is a perspective or modality for learning. But we have been framing innovation too narrowly. Innovation is not an outcome. It too is a perspective and that perspective is governed by play which in some cases might be thought of as tinkering.
… ideas are works of bricolage. They are, almost inevitably, networks of other ideas. We take the ideas we’ve inherited or stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape.
Adjacent possible
Stuart Kauffman – the adjacent possible – the linkage between and among first order combinations. The phrase captures both the limits and the creative potential of change and innovation. The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.
The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations. Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open. You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that you haven’t visited yet. Once you open one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new doors appear, each leading to a brand-new room that you couldn’t have reached from your original starting point. Keep opening new doors and eventually you’ll have built a palace.
The goal of the ILC is to provide appropriate tools and spaces for educators, entrepreneurs, dreamers and tinkers to imagine and explore innovations in teaching and learning. It will engage the UBC community – both town and gown, in all aspects of innovative pedagogy, supporting economic growth in the region, and continuing to advance the proven accomplishments of K-20 educators who work and live outside the lower mainland.
The ILC recognizes its unique position within a nimble campus and embraces both the potential and promise for contributing to the place of mind on the Okanagan campus of the University of British Columbia. The ILC consists of three integrated components – a design studio, an incubator for pedagogical innovations, and an innovative classroom, each synergistically linked to a research hub, (i.e., the proposed Centre for Research and Mindful Engagement, CRME). Activity within each component of the ILC is detailed in the management plan.
Educators and industry will benefit from the Innovative Learning Centre through collaborative projects and synergies afforded by access to research, design, incubation, and testing. The ILC will become a home for educators, undergraduate and graduate students, visiting academics, entrepreneurs, and industry partners as we work together to imagine and design new ways of thinking and learning in a time of substantial change, globalization, and ubiquitous access to information. We recognize that Canada’s place in the knowledge economy rests substantially on the ability of education and research institutions to inquire into and grapple with new ways of engaging learners in discovery and innovation.
In 2008 I attended Design and the Elastic Mind at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Images and ideas have stayed with me, prompting the question – What does educational experimental design look like at the intersection of innovation, functionality, aesthetics, and deep knowledge of brain research?
Design is the bridge between the abstraction of research and the tangible requirements of practice (Itrusha & Roberts, 2008). It is “the translation of scientific and technological revolutions into approachable objects [and examples] that change people’s lives” (p. 4). Design helps develop the elastic mind that forms and informs innovation. Bergdoll (2008, p. 10) suggests mental elasticity creates the “flexibility and strength to embrace progress and harness it” and is “best suited to confront a changing world of seemingly limitless challenges and possibilities.”
Now, in an increasing time of substantial change, globalization and almost ubiquitous access to the Internet, literature (Wagner, 2012, and others) suggests we need problem solvers, innovators, and inventors who are self-reliant and can think creatively and logically. People with minds elastic enough to survive and thrive with change and uncertainty. Ironically, at the same time, educators, economists, parents and students criticize existing formal education institutions, suggesting traditional venues are not fostering innovative capacity, encouraging student engagement, and/or integrating technology meaningfully into learning. As we come closer to the end of the second decade of the 21st century, the intent of the ILC is to (1) acknowledge the inadequate models of innovative teaching practice and the limited number of creative learning environments where educators, learners, and industry can design, build, incubate and research imaginative technology enhanced teaching and learning, and (2) to provide some examples of what might be.
The purpose of the ILC is to investigate the look, feel and design of an innovative learning environment within a formal educational setting. It will investigate both physical and virtual elements used to disrupt traditional teaching and support interactive, playful, deep learning in a more studio based way, building on Johnson’s notion of the genius of the tinkerer (2010). Specifically, the ILC, through collaboration, research and practice, will seek existing examples of exemplary institutional design; imagine with educational leaders what might be required; partner with industry and academics with an understanding of design to assemble, use and research spaces that by their very design (furnishing, technology, pedagogy, look and feel) invite changed and enhanced practice.
Findings will inform Canadian companies working at the forefront of (1) educational software design and (2) educational furnishing design to imagine and understand the impact physical space and design of learning environments has on learner engagement and the development of creative potential and meaningful learning for learners – both educators and students. Findings will also inform academics, and educators as to the potential of disruptive learning environments to support innovative practices and suggest ways to design learning experiences suggested by Einstein when he said, “I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.” This research will continue to an understanding of the conditions required to foster and sustain innovations in teaching and learning.
References
Bond, T. (2012). Flipping the classroom with Glogsteredu. iTunes iBooks: California Baptist University & GlogsterEDU.
Johnson, S. (Sept. 25, 2010). The Genius of the Tinkerer. The Wall street Journal – Saturday Essay. Retrieved from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703989304575503730101860838.html
Wagner, T. (2012). Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change The World. New York: Scribner.
Young, J. & McCormick, T. (2012) (Eds). Rebooting the academy: 12 tech innovators who are transforming campus. Washington, DC: The Chronicle of Higher Education.