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A Democratic Agency

Brian Hughes — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 03:15:28 +0000

For me, the story about EdLab—its purpose, vision, and strategy—boils down to the goal of democracy. This post is a reflection on today’s seminar by Gary Natriello, but I think it may also resonate with anyone who’s a part of a similar organization.

Gary articulated a vision of the future of the education sector that follows from a few basic assumptions about learning, economics, and technology. Namely, that the so-called “digital revolution” is ringing in a new age of “networked learning” (think: low-cost, p2p learning). He also shared his concern that while we ought to want to help shape this future, it seems unlikely that we at EdLab—as products of the current educational system—can feasibly do so. Why exactly? Because it would be too hard for us to participate in the midwifery of this new sector: pay cuts, lay-offs, new (possibly lower, or non-existant) educational standards, and so on.

Sound bad? It sounded even more bleak when he said it in front of a Keynote deck that juxtaposed glamourous visions of childhood with the realities of work at Foxconn. . .

But I don’t really follow his line of thinking all the way down that bleak path, and I’m particularly skeptical about two of his basic assumptions (and let me acknowledge that it’s easy to be skeptical—it’s hard to be the one in front of the room).

Assumption #1: We currently prioritize uniformity as an educational outcome.

Well. . . I guess so, but it seems like uniformity is just one of many outcomes of the current educational system. I agree we value it, as it seems integral to a democratic ideal of equal opportunity, so it’s hard to imagine a successful democracy without a shared sense of history, science, culture, etc. Perhaps Gary’s view of education can aptly be described as post-democratic.

Assumption #2: The expense of the current educational system makes it unsustainable.

I don’t know enough about economic principles to mount a compelling counterargument, but what the heck, it’s a blog, right? I don’t buy it, and here’s why: Somewhere there must be a principle of modern capitalism about potential and purpose of “creating new markets,” and the point must be that when everything is accounted for, there is a huge surplus of labor in the world. That is, the amenities of capital-generating activities seem to be diverse enough to support a virtuous circle of labor. (Sure wealth is distributed unequally, but hey, a lot of people are willing to work to afford the data plan on their iPhone.)

Why should this come to an end? And why shouldn’t education—even in its increasingly expensive forms—partake in this economy? My response to Gary is that the current education is sustainable. But I wouldn’t want to suggest that it’s deeply democratic. In terms of the cost of education, I think the education sector is already incredibly diverse (though we don’t like to admit it)—if only because education is so unevenly applied (note: additional skepticism about uniformity). So it’s going to become more interestingly diverse as different types of education are increasingly acknowledged as legitimate. In this way, I think Gary’s view is overly pessimistic about future economic conditions.

Conclusions

When I reflect on where my views intersect with Gary’s, I’m confronted by a surprisingly optimistic view of education. It’s a view that counterbalances the news cycle—how putting iPads in kid’s hands is going to empower them and “save schools”—and affords us a different, more democratic space to work (at EdLab, and similar do-tanks). Yes, it’s a technology-rich space, but that’s not the point. Our goal is to locate or create cheap tools that give more learners access to key knowledge. It’s not about the best education. It’s probably not even good yet. But it’s getting better, and more real every day.

Further Questions. . .

Isn’t the Internet itself enough? It’s cheap, and it provides key knowledge! But let’s make it even better. . .
Can or should educational organizations compete with no-cost, advertising-driven technologies?
Can or will the anti-democratic effects of high-cost education ever be overcome through other social means?

A Service Design Opportunity

Brian Hughes — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 16:28:13 +0000

I just participated in a two day workshop run by Engine, a UK design group that focuses on applying diverse design processes to designing customer-oriented services. The workshop focused on designing services that are complex by nature, usually involving “four P’s”: People, Places, Processes, and Products (not to be confused with the four P’s of marketing). My goal was to better understand the work we can do to deliver amazing services at the Gottesman Libraries and EdLab.

Joining me were leaders and designers from large and small companies, across many industries. Engine staff presented several very interesting cases (examples from their portfolio) that involved many design methods – methods that are often located within the double diamond design process framework. Learning about their process allowed me to reflect extensively on EdLab’s home-grown CSG process, and how we could modify them for service design (or adopt entirely new practices).

A Library Example

Involving a whole organization in designing (and redesigning) services is becoming increasingly popular in large organizations with ambitious agendas — and service design is quickly being recognized as a distinct design specialty. To share the kind of processes I was exposed to over the past two days, here is a very broad sketch of a possible design scenario library staff could host at Teachers College.

Exploration Phase (Phase 1):

The Opportunity Statement:

To kick off a service design process, an organization must agree on a problem to work on. Short of this, here’s a general opportunity to consider here: What signature service can we add to the library?

Goal Planning:

Let’s try to go from brainstorming to piloting a prototype in three phases over three months.

Elements of Stakeholder Event (Event 1):

Get everyone who will be working on the project (including TCstudents, library staff and the Provost or a representative from his office) together to better understand the opportunity and goals.
Share an existing case study that relates to a similar institution.
Review background materials.
Share a “blueprint” of the whole service design process that guides the three-month-long project.

Post event:

Invite participants to review background research and share perspectives.
Share a short video that captures the activities of the first event (this can be public).
Share a written “design brief” that captures the activities of the first event (this can be public).

Insight Phase (Phase 2):

Elements of Stakeholder Event (Event 2):

Use “Personas” and service scenarios to develop a shared understanding of opportunities. Be ambitious.
Generate ideas for new services and related design solutions (how services will be implemented, delivered, maintained, and refined) to prototype.
Use a “service principles” framework to focus on a particular opportunity to focus on.

Post event:

Create PX (patron experience) teams to carry out several kinds of design research.
Report back to the larger group with outcomes from the research.
Share a short video that captures the activities of the first event (this can be public). Capture interviews with participants.
Share a written “design brief” that captures the activities of the first event (this can be public).

Prototyping Phase (Phase 3):

Elements of a Stakeholder Event (Event 3):

Generate a final set of possible services around the service opportunity (from Stakeholder Event 2), and narrow to a single service.
Develop a set of elements of the service from both the patron perspective and the organizational perceptive.
Develop a recommended “service blueprint” that responds to the findings from the design research (a condensed list). The blueprint explains the service from both the patron and staff perspectives.

Post event:

Make final adjustments to scale and scope of the service.
Refine and adapt the service blueprint to serve as a training resource for staff.
Share a short video that captures the activities of the first event (this can be public). Capture interviews with participants.
Share a written “design brief” that captures the activities of the first event (this can be public).

Implementation:

Iterate a version of the service and try it.
Collect feedback on the service.
Share feedback with the Stakeholders, and explore next steps.

Final Thoughts

Yes, the Services Design process is a humble one. But if it’s done well, it has the potential to improve an organization’s services at multiple points over time. As a process, it’s infused with the ethos of transparency and co-creation – inviting patrons to be part of the library’s process of developing and refining services. Due to the total cost of the process, however, it should not be used to tackle small issues. That is, it’s not meant to overcome the usual challenges of bureaucracy and resource limitations. It’s meant to open up new opportunities that have the potential to expand an organization (as well as positively impact its current culture).

Apologies for cross-posting this example on the EdLab blog.

Intellectual Cosmopolitanism

Brian Hughes — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 02:42:43 +0000

A suggestive graphic by http://www.flickr.com/photos/acolavecchio/

I’m getting excited for the upcoming New York Times’ Schools for Tomorrow conference, and working on my presentation. I’ll be on the “Tools Available (college-level)” panel, and I’d like to convey some ideas about the future balance between tradition and timeliness in the academy. It’s hard to articulate an interesting position in the 5-10 minutes that I’ll likely have. So here’s one idea . . .

Without prognosticating, I’ll sketch out a view of the growing necessity of intellectual cosmopolitanism at the K-12 level—the idea that curriculum must continue to diversify around cultures and cultural practices.[1] Why? Well, as people around the world are increasingly connected, it’ll be harder to maintain a narrow worldview—and related mental habits. Right? (Hey, I’m not suggesting this will happen overnight.) In other words: more tech = more appreciation of diversity.

The import for college-level learning is that students will already have formed a two-pronged approach to education: increasingly relying on personal and non-school tools (more appreciation of diversity = a greater economic incentive to learn) for rote and “professional” learning (including deep expertise in academic subjects) while engaging community-focused and group-based learning in the classroom.

On this view (and let’s say 10-20 years away, just to push the limits of non-prognostication), civics emerges as a dominant theme of secondary formal education, while higher education increasingly becomes grounded in problem-solving (now more fashionably called “design”). Traditional modes of liberal learning (reading, writing, discussing) will not disappear so much as take place outside of formal education (fingers-crossed?). Instead of lamenting this retreat, educators must to pursue ways to connect group work to liberal learning—to make it count, so to speak.

Sound familiar? The more things change . . .

OK, so this isn’t groundbreaking stuff, but I think this perspective allows me to speak to several interesting points:

Group work will be standard practice. And it needs to get much better. Mainstream collaboration tools like Google Docs have improved communication and information sharing (full disclosure: I haven’t yet checked for evidence here), but there is room for improvement and specialization. Today, there are dozens of collaborative writing tools for different purposes. We can expect to see these options across all disciplines and modes of knowledge-sharing. Goodbye lectures.

Certification will happen outside of school. Yep, that’s right: no more “high stakes” tests in college, at least. Probably K-12 too. Students will still have to take them for a variety of reasons, but they’ll be created and offered by national (international!) consortiums (of one sort or another) and proctored by a handful private companies (want to take the SAT at a Google facility, anyone?).

Open data standards don’t matter. Students of all ages will want access to their own data. And they should get it from small companies and large educational organizations alike by virtue of market pressure. But that doesn’t mean companies have to adopt complex systems (like Raymond’s data backpack). I know this is speaking heresy, but this is good news for small companies who would otherwise be squeezed out of the education space but tech giants—a scenario that would be reminiscent of publishing giants dictating curriculum through textbook production.

Thoughts? I still have plenty of time to sharpen my thinking!

[1] I’m not sure if the term “intellectual cosmopolitanism” has been used elsewhere, but I think it poetically captures the force that technologies are exerting on curriculums and teaching practices.

Transmedia for Social Change

Brian Hughes — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 06:56:27 +0000

Today I attended the final day of an intensive workshop event hosted by Working Films. The event brought together a diverse group of talented filmmakers, powerful activists, and leaders in the education sector – I was lucky I got to crash their party! In their own words, it was:

a residential workshop designed to help filmmakers and non-profit organizations leverage the power of films that document some of the most significant problems – and innovative local solutions – that unfold every day in schools across the United States and the world… [The last day] is a day of serious strategy for groups already committed to advancing change in the educational sector!

Cool stuff. At the center of the event were seven amazing films (links below). After hearing from the production teams and seeing clips from their films, we workshopped “social action” strategy in small groups.

Social Action

Action. Justice. Change. Transformation. Learning. There was a lot of passion in the films, and a lot of potential to start conversations, dialogue, etc. So that’s where we started. It was a lot to take in: the filmmakers (and by extension the production companies) shared their visions of the kind of impact they wanted their films to have. Better educational opportunities? Yes. Empowerment for underserved groups? Yes. Social change? You bet. Some of their ideas overlapped, some diverged.

A theme from the ongoing discussion that stood out to me was what someone in the group referred to as a “transmedia strategy” – from the idea of transmedia storytelling across multiple platforms and formats (Kinder 1991, Jenkins 2003). The conversation that emerged throughout the day was how the filmmakers – if they wanted to enhance the transformative potential of their films – were likely going to leave the more familiar domain of film… and enter into meatspace and cyberspace in new ways.

Or, in other words, the essential question of the day was: How can films lead to action?

I think everyone was sympathetic to the idea that discussion isn’t enough – that talk is cheap, as they say, even with respect to democratic action. And there was a shared sense among the activists and the educators that the films could do even more.

Notes on Transmedia Strategy

So this was my schtick about trying to get things done online: Start by creating opportunities for “engagement” across a spectrum of actions ranging from simple to complex. (Twitter = simple. Facebook = pretty simple. Embedding video = getting harder. Coming to your site = not so simple. Using your tools = takes some dedication. Putting content on your site = hard.) The Internet may be somewhat indifferent to your ideology (so to speak), but it is definitely not indifferent to the design of your software/applications/etc. A strategy that includes many of these elements – and successfully engages your audience – is a sufficient transmedia strategy.

Across the seven projects (“projects” seems better than “films” in this context), there was already a variety of thinking about online and social action strategy. Interestingly, I sometimes couldn’t tell if an idea for an “app” or a website was a tie-in or a tool – and it occurs to me now that that’s probably a bad sign. Allow for a quick clarification of terms: for me, a tie-in is a filmworld thing (to bring people to the experience of the film), and a tool is an educational thing (that empowers people to change things). The two can go hand-in-hand – and I nodded my head positively as we talked about that – but it is an uneasy relationship.

I suspect it would pay off to disentangle a tool from other tie-ins. They’re different animals. A good example of this kind of distance is the “professional development experience for teachers.” That’s something that someone else builds, and inserts some excerpts from your film into. It’s not a tie-in as much as a tool. And: let someone else make that tool.

But, let’s say you want to build a tool for social change, and you want to do it yourself.

You want to build a way to help parents connect. A way to give young learners a voice. A way to make families without children care about education. A way to help people achieve a new literacy. (Let’s agree to ignore the teachers here on the premise that they got the professional development kit.) You’ve now taken off your filmmakers’ hat off and put on a crazy new hat. You’re building a new tool.

First of all, you still need the aforementioned transmedia strategy: that’s your so-called social media funneling people of all kinds toward your film experience. A tool isn’t that. And, perhaps sadly, it’s not your film either – that helps, but it’s a non-starter in an online/digital/phone/app space. It’s also not your festival-in-a-box (that’s a tie-in). If you want a great tool, don’t confuse amplification with transformation. Amplification is about getting the word out and the conversation started. Transformation is when you enable every person to make it their own.

Sidenote: let’s agree not to aim to change policy on day one. Not with the tool that you’re going to put online (or on a mobile device). Let’s be realistic here: it would be a huge win if your chosen constituency finds your tool as useful as a scrap of paper. You’ll have to build up from there.

So, secondly, and most importantly, you need to make a useful tool. A humble, easy-to-understand tool. One with a little inspiration and imagination. It’s just one part of your transmedia strategy. It’s the part that aims at a very specific group of people and allows them to engage or enact the ideas that are buried deep within your film. It’s a super simple thing that may spring into the world wholly-formed, or take shape through many stages of refinement and revision. Sure, it’s a tie-in, but it shouldn’t look like one. It has to be a gift.

So let’s get to the unpleasantries. Unpleasantry #1: If you want your film to be part of a tool, you have to give your media away for free. Yep: that’s how the Internet wants it. That’s how educators want it. That’s how students want it. You don’t have to give it all away. And this isn’t just a strategy to get people to come and pay for another experience. This is a reality. It’s a reality for films that are good, authentic, truthful, honest, and transformative. If that means your film, that’s probably a good thing. Get over it. Keep your day job. Etc.

Unpleasantry #2: Developing good tools is hard. It’s easy to throw a lot of money at the problem and lose. But that doesn’t mean it’s expensive. You just need new friends. These new friends will be young, opinionated, difficult to communicate with, and just generally strange by your standards. (That’s okay though, right? You’re a filmmaker for goodness’ sake.) The words they should be saying to you are: simple, iterative, open source. That’s not a recipe; it’s just a good foundation. If they’re not saying those things, good luck to you. I have no idea what you’re building.

Unpleasantry #3: You need data. You need to convince your new aforementioned friend(s) that you need data. Each and every new aforementioned friend will not like the idea of gathering data, but with a little push, he or she can create a nice foundation. Traffic? Sure. An understanding of how individuals use your tool? Excellent. Demographic data? That would be nice. It’s unclear what you’ll do with it now, but it’s for the future. It’s for growing. It’s for understanding what you’re actually doing. Collect it. Organize it. Save it. If your tool is successful, it’s going to help you tell your story. Data is the cinematography of the digital world. (Hypothesis for further exploration: collecting great data is the high art of social change.)

Bonus round: give your users control over their content and their data. This will ingratiate you to the geeks and the media literate, but it’s also a great practice that will help you build a community around your tool. Give them an easy way to give you feedback, too.

Lastly, importantly,

I hope this vaguely coherent rant is more clarifying than it is discouraging. There is a ton of room in this world for transmedia for social change. We’re giving up too much if we leave it all up to Facebook, Google, and Apple. Jump in and play a bit. Hey, you’ve made a film… do you really want to do that again anytime soon?

Also, don’t forget about the people in your films. They are the people who have been given the most powerful tool of all.

Lastly, a big thanks to the multitalented organizers of the workshop, and, of course, anyone who had to suffer through an encounter with me, lol.

The films:

art as work » Featured

A Democratic Agency

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A Service Design Opportunity

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Intellectual Cosmopolitanism

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Transmedia for Social Change

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