This week in the LCL course we focused on the topic of Open Learning and had a chance to hear from two self-identified Open Learning activists.
Audrey Watters and Benjamin Mako Hill have made a practice of leveraging the power of the internet to learn independently and express ideas about self-directed learning. They’re actively working to bring FREE & OPEN LEARNING opportunities to online and offline communities. They’ve made this the focus of their creative work– sharing their personal experiences in both traditional and non-traditional education pathways and supporting free and open source software and global internet learning initiatives unfolding around the world.
Audrey Watters, a writer and life-long learner created a website called Hack Education. The bio on her website pretty much sums up her style, philosophy and art:
Audrey Watters is an education writer, rabble-rouser, rambler, recovering academic, lifelong learner, serial dropout, part-time badass, mom.
Benjamin Mako Hill, a powerhouse in the free & open software movement also spoke on the panel.
While studying at MIT Mako participated in the production of a bunch of cool education and technology projects including the One Laptop per Child project which brought the “$100 lap-top” to youth around the world.
I had a chance to learn about an earlier version of the laptop back in 2011 at the Flagship Computer Clubhouse with a couple of Clubhouse members interested in producing a review of the laptop and interviewing some of the people on the OLPC team. Check out the interview below.
The rugged, playful and intuitively designed lap-top gives youth in urban, rural and remote areas around the world access to open source software and programs like Scratch. Additionally youth can access Wikipedia and other developing open education projects to enhance their own learning and create self-directed, interest-based projects.
The idea behind this playful yet powerful computer closely aligns with the mission of Scratch (and The Children’s Machine)—created to invite young people to move beyond mere consumption of educational and interest-based media, and take active roles as media producers and programmers of expressive and interactive content. The design of the laptop has evolved significantly over the years. The little curious looking machine continues to reach youth globally–in places as remote and rural as the villages in the mountains of Peru and as urban as some technology classrooms in the Bronx and beyond.
As part of our activities for reflecting on Open Learning and the culture and ideas surrounding it, we were challenged to take part in a series of creative open learning activities which included learning something from someone in the class and teaching something. Scratch was also in the mix this week. We were asked to explore the art of Re-Mix by finding a project on the scratch website, modifying it with a personal twist and re-publishing it. Click on the image below to see the animation. This remix is an attempt to express visually the concept of ongoing CHANGE through the tension and friction created by the push and pull of opposing (yet complimentary) dialectic forces. (See here for an awesome 2nd technicolor re-mix of this project created by LCL participant Peter Taylor)
My creative approach to these activities take on a little bit of a, shall we say—experimental quality?
The first concept that came to mind as I was listening to the Open Learning talk was DIALECTICS, Yin/Yang theory, the kind of stuff that the Hadron Collider seems to be getting at on a scientific level… no? Too big of a stretch?—Two opposing (yet complimentary) forces coming full throttle toward one another to create meaningful change in society and what we have come to accept as “the education system.”
As I was listening to Audrey and Mako speak I had all kinds of images flashing through my mind. I had this one image of the two of them as badass superheroes. I can imagine a story of these two young life-long learners working boldly, creatively and subversively to push back against the institutionalized practice of over-pricing meaningful education and making it a privileged commodity by limiting or denying access to the many in the service of the few. It seems like the sort of lifestyle worthy of sharing in a new media form– someone out there with drawing skills, PLEASE turn these stories into a cool graphic novel or educational comic or a good film on the creative education revolution currently underway on the internet.
My mind is on fire with these ideas!
Here’s a little musical interlude for you… a multimedia remix of the song my friends and family have been buzzing about on Facebook, Alicia Keys’ “Girl on Fire” edited to images from the film based on the novel series “The Hunger Games” by Youtube remixer Kanaal Van. Thought I’d share it, since it’s the song that kept playing in my head while I was reading the article “Mind on Fire”.
So many things to think about! So many project possibilities!
I found this week to be the most challenging in the course so far. I’ve gaged this by the fact that I learned more in this session than I can possibly share in just one blog entry (I could probably write a whole series on the topic).
I learned lots this week from mentors, peers in the community, the panelists, the chat sessions, the Google hangouts and also from the media that came to mind in the process of developing this entry—the best of which I shared on the Google+ LCL community as part of my “teach someone” activity.
I was experimenting with indirectly teaching—meaning just trying to embody the ideas as opposed to directly leading a “class”. I’m not sure how effective this actually is, but like I said I’m experimenting with some ideas and playing around with new ways of teaching and learning, in the spirit of free and open ways of knowing and sharing.
What exactly was I trying to share in my “teaching” this week?
A process that I often use as a prep-tool for multimedia storytelling… The closest term I can find to describe how I’ve come to learn and teach story-telling is the term visual priming.
This is part of the work that goes into collecting ideas, language, images and other snippets of information and data to re-mix and weave into something new— a collage of ideas that point in unique and interesting directions. I want to try to articulate these processes at some point. But for now, I’m trying to see if I can convey some creative ideas, learn from other learners and share inspiration with who ever is drawn to the bits that I’m gathering for visual storytelling.
Speaking of re-mixing ideas and storytelling, I participated in this week’s LCL challenges! I learned more about Plot Structures from Jacob Zimmer, who hosted a helpful Google hangout session to share ideas about Storytelling through the lens of his unique theater background. Click on “The Hero’s Journey” image produced by Jacob (to the right) to see the 35min video re-cap of our online class.
I tried to apply what I learned about “conflict” and “tension” in the storytelling process by attempting to write a short story called The Yin/Yang boys. I’ll share it…(Scroll to the end of post to read the story) but please keep in mind that this is a first draft of a little story I tried to piece together, which was inspired by a link to another story shared in a comment by Kemlo Aki on the Google+ community. The story is called A Cup of Tea and it’s done in a Zen Buddhist style of writing which I found beautifully simple to grasp and which was shared with me in response to the video clip from the movie Instinct– shared below as a good visual illustration of the tensions that exist between thinking and learning philosophies. (Note in particular the ideas about “givers” and “takers”)
I guess you could say this was part of my “visual priming” process for this blog entry on Dialectics and the Yin/Yang theory as it relates to changes in education and the role that folks like Audrey and Mako are playing to advance the free and open education movement on the internet as a humanitarian effort.
Here’s a brief clip from the movie Half-Nelson— showing a young teacher using dialectics to teach his students History.
I changed my state of mind this week from a frustrated non-creative push to a more relaxed “middle path” creative pull by playing around with the concept of Dialectics and remixing a Yin Yang animation project on the Scratch website. The task put me in a very good mood and helped me make all kind of creative connections both for the LCL course and just everyday life out here in the world.
Dialectics seemed like such an appropriate topic to share this week in light of the ideas presented by the LCL panelists.
Just for fun here’s a little project exploring the dialectics of storytelling as a visual theme in a little production game/ design challenge on the theme of Heroes & Villains. We co-produced this little movie to illustrate the “epic tension” between the costumed characters the teens invented as part of my Media Tech class at the Urban Scholars program Summer Innovation Institute. The course was part of an experimental collab maker’s game-show project I made up called the Young Producers.
I think that what Audrey and Mako are doing out in the world is very exciting. They are creating pathways for people like me (and most likely YOU) who learn best through experiences, projects and creative reflections, to be successful in the world applying alternative ideas for personal development and shared learning.
It’s helpful to see examples of the creative activism happening right now. Because things do seem impossible out here sometimes, and stories like these just illuminate new pathways and begin to cut away old frustrations.
Sometimes when I spend way too much time taking everything super serious and not playing enough in my learning process, I get stuck in a sort of unpleasant glitch, or mental “bug”— a kind of narcissistic thought loop that I’ve learned to resolve over the years by reading, writing and sitting quietly, without distractions for long stretches of time.
This is basically the process that helps me come up for air and re-set when my independent self-directed learning and productions lead to boundless intensity and what can only be described as “negative mush”. I hope that make sense? I think it does… but regardless, that’s the best I can articulate the kind of “debugging” that sometime must happen in my creative thought process before I can actually get to work on something productive in “professional” settings where things are as they have been for so long— stale and continuously missing the mark.
There are (though still far too few) glimmers of change in systems of education, especially community based initiatives. I was inspired by the work I did with Marcos Beleche (community developer/organizer) & Jamie Ryan (filmmaker & entrepreneur) at the Codman Square Computer Learning center where I helped to start the vibe and set the alternative education tone for a new community learning center in Roxbury, Ma. During my short stay at the Computer Learning Center, I collaborated with tenants of the low-income housing complex to create individualized “online education maps” to help us collectively understand what each member of the community was interested in learning and sharing with the group. We developed a really neat creative environment for everyone to enjoy. With this flexible learning environment in place, drop-in students of all ages stopped in to learn whatever they needed that day–sometimes I taught people how to create email addresses, sometimes I showed them how to find free furniture on craigslist, sometimes we just hung out and traveled down memory lane, reminiscing on Google about the places we’ve been to, the people and things we’ve seen and heard along the way and why these things mattered to us. It was a very communal learning experience and although I was only there for a few months, it really impacted my personal growth and my drive to learn more about community-based technology and education initiatives.
Teaching adult learners how to use computers was extremely challenging and rewarding. I was faced with the REALITY that there are people out in the world who have zero experience with computers. In my role as a community teacher I had to think about things like… How do I teach computer literacy to someone who can’t yet read or write? How do I talk about what the internet is and can do in Spanish? How do I create a safe environment where adults and youth work side-by-side and collaboratively to enhance their own education? These were all real-world challenges that I was forced to tackle in taking on this sort of work. What is rewarding about trying to find solutions to these issues is that you end up with a wealth of knowledge about what works and doesn’t work and you end up meeting amazing people like Deborah, whose lovely and positive drive to learn make every difficult challenge regardless of how seemingly impossible, worth a try. Meet Deborah:
Deborah and several other adult learners in this community taught me how to teach with confidence. They nurtured me through the process and forgave my novice blunders. Many of the people I worked with were twice, sometimes three times my age and though I began the journey with nervousness and self-doubt, their eagerness and willingness to dive right in and see what happens, that wonderful experimental and creative energy made me believe that it is possible to bring positive change into the world with technology, one community at a time and learn the whole way through about life, love, democracy, happiness, failure, success, heartache, nostalgia–all of the poetry of life.
I believe we are indeed on the verge of some big changes that will make much of that frustration with the old, exclusive, and far too often racist institutions evaporate to make room for creative productivity.
As others opt for self-directed learning online and rely less and less on traditional schools, the power dynamic may begin to finally shift from the institution to the individual, social learner.
The LCL conversation on Open Learning has been a nice creative brain zap reminding me to ease up, listen and play to make room for new possibilities as opposed to just continue banging my head against institutional walls, wasting time fixating on what isn’t working.
Like Joi Ito has suggested in several of his public speeches, it is far more powerful to pull creatively with many others toward something new, then to push independently against the same old tired crap.
I’m writing this entry not because I have mastered this balance of things or this way of thinking, but because I strive to remember these connections and use them when needed, but also share them with others learning online who can benefit from these ideas and add to them in new and unique ways.
I’m curious to know what all of you think of this badass movement underway. Write a comment below and share the connections you’ve made on the Rockshelf.
Here’s some useful media to follow along on this week’s P2PU Open Learning conversation:
Learning Creative Learning – Session 5 – Open Learning
John Seely Brown and Richard Adler (2008): Minds on Fire. Educause Review.
Ivan Illich: Deschooling Society (Chapter 6: Learning Webs)
(Update: Added) The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource
A QUICK ATTEMPT AT STORYTELLING: Please note this is an idea drafted very quickly into story form and it’s far from polished. Feel free to re-mix it, make it better, more interesting, dynamic, colorful… Make it your own in whatever way you’re moved to do so. All I ask is that if you do re-mix it, send us a link or post it in the comments section below so that we can all learn from the changes you made to the core narrative. Thanks! & Happy Learning Everyone!
The Yin/Yang Boys
By
Rosa Alemán
Yin and Yang, two brothers on a secret adventure to advance a harmonic business partnership in the world flee the tyranny of the local education factory and leave their district in search of a creativity facilitator in the city of Hope to help them unleashed their innate warrior skills, Yang’s creative power, and Yin’s powerful and sometimes destructive focus.
Yin and Yang were not brothers by blood, they were brothers by oath. An oath taken when the boys were 9 years old and found themselves abandoned, orphaned by indifference in their respective homes.
After a scuffle in the lunch room of their education ward, the boys were placed in a detention unit and forced to stare at each other for hours pecking at math equations that neither of them was sure how to solve.
After an hour of silently wondering what was binding them to these rules of isolation, Yin, the bolder, and edgier of the two, spoke up and offered a peace treaty in the form of a question.
“Wouldn’t it be wild if we walked out of here right now like brothers and never looked back?”
Yang didn’t say anything, he sat in silence and thought for a long time before he said,
“Let’s go brother.” And off they went.
The two had few things in common. Their philosophies of right and wrong often created conflict between the two and they would end up in great big arguments that would sometimes end with changes in their friendship—but never total separation.
The big-bang moment that tested their brotherhood happened one year after the two brothers escaped their local education factory and carved an underground tunnel to a public music studio funded by “We the People”—a global learning collective formed online and hosted in local community learning hubs.
Yin and Yang spent months working on their production skills and musical talents with the help of a creative facilitator named Asor who connected with the two boys and shared knowledge, time and resources.
They all got along well for many months.
The boys often stuck around the studio and told wild stories about their adventures underground. Sometime they helped other warrior-artists with their projects, sometimes they worked nonstop on their own, but no matter what was going on, Yin and Yang were always working. Yang, the mastermind, worked harder than the laid back, charismatic charmer Yin, who preferred to woo everyone who came in contact with him and figured things out as he went along working from his box of tricks.
Regardless of their relationship dynamics, the two were inseparable. They relied on each other for just about everything. They were always working on something complex, unique and secretive, as they were accustomed to doing in their education districts.
One day, the boys came to the studio quarrelling about something they refused to share with Asor , the creativity facilitator. A plan of some sort… some kind of vision that they disagreed about.
Asor was confused, she had seen this dynamic duo disagree before but she had never witnessed them turning on each other with such intense fury.
She worried about the boys and tried to connect with them on the way out the door. Yin, hugged Asor goodbye, but Yang just looked at his feet as he walked passed her out the door. She could tell there was something he wasn’t sharing.
Later that evening, after Asor had closed up the studio and was on her way home, she received a call from the Public Service department. Someone had broken into the studio and stolen all of the music equipment.
In a panic, Asor, drove back to the studio and saw nothing but an old pair sneakers left on dusty chair. The Nike’s belonged to Yin. She remembered seeing the Red swoosh disappear into the crowd earlier that afternoon after the boys had fought and brought the tension in the room to an all-time high.
This was Yin’s signature move. He had a thing about making a grand exit and leaving a mark.
The following day Yang stopped in to see Asor. He knew she would be very upset and he tried to help the situation. He told her that Yin and he have parted ways.
“He and I are not speaking right now.” said Yang.
It was clear that Yang did not believe in Yin’s approach. Yang knew that the way Yin went about destroying the harmony of the studio community, the one place helping to give their collaboration a voice, was wrong.
He felt that Yin had violated their brotherhood pact, and oath to listen to one another and co-create in peace. He understood that Yin, in stealing the studio equipment had created bad karma for himself.
Yang decided to push back with all his might and help build the studio back up with the sweat of his own brow.
After a few month of hard work, Yang got the community studio back up and running. Yin was surprisingly enjoying success of his own as well. The stolen equipment had gotten him all of the attention he craved and made him very wealthy very quickly.
The more money Yin made, the more he pushed against his brother Yang’s community efforts. The two grew further and further apart.
And then one day, just out of the blue…Yang decided to forgive his brother and let him be. Instead of getting the other community members to rally against Yin’s growing empty music empire, he inspired community members to put their focus on building up their own work with the same intense passion Yin had built his—He suggested that instead of being driven by destructive thoughts, that the community take a creative, inclusive and supportive stance.
Another year passed and each new artist out of the community studio went global with every single and album produced in the studio.
Yin on the other hand was suffering rapid losses. People had stopped paying attention to his hype, his charms and manipulations were no longer working. He was forced to innovate and keep up with the many artists being launched from the community studio.
But, no matter how hard Yin tried to catch up, the community just went on producing hit after hit and he kept plummeting into poverty.
Exhausted, broke and burnt out, Yin returned to the studio and asked for his brother Yang’s forgiveness.
His brother Yang, seeing that Yin had been through a lot, extended a welcoming hand and made a place for his brother in the open community table where he was once again able to participate, produce his music and reach a wider audience than ever before—an audience that was fostered by the hard work, dedication and passion of Yang and his community of supportive artists.
Yin and Yang lived in balanced harmony for many years, learning from one another and using their differences not to repel each other but to form a creative whole in the service of transforming the district they came from.
The End.
Tagged: Audrey Watters, Benjamin Mako Hill, Construction, Creative Commons, Dialectics, Free Education, Joi Ito, Learning, Learning Creative Learning, Learning on the Internet, Learning Online, Lifelong Kindergarten, Maker Movement, MIT Media Lab, Mitchel Resnick, Open Education, Open Learning, Open Source, P2PU, Remix Culture, Rockshelf Studio, Rosa Aleman, Scratch, Seymour Papert
