How do the stories we read, hear, or come to know make us who we are?
What if we could track and annotate how these stories constitute our identity and behavior? (Or perhaps rather our rational deliberations?)
If we had a map of that similar to the mapping of genomes, could that be a useful educational tool? Or a tool for better understanding others?
I think we’d want to know and highlight the biggest influences and to see “storied” context of why they are our biggest influences—why they are meaningful to us.
The resulting map would constitute a different “story genome” for each person. It would be a quantified self tool that would require constant updating and revising. I think we could learn a lot about ourselves and others.
“Library Orientation” in the Learning Theater, Summer 2016 by Yuntong Man
I just had the great fortune of spending two days with Leakey Foundation members exploring the meaning of evolution (and human origins) in relation to the theme of “human survival.” It was an amazing experience led by seven thoughtful and well-spoken scientists speaking about diverse topics such as physiology, virology, climatology, behavioral psychology, and more.
It not only led me to reflect on how to describe my work, but (perhaps predictably) how to describe it at a cocktail party in under two minutes. And for me, that’s the challenge of describing EdLab.
What are folks at EdLab doing?
At EdLab, our work touches on many of the ideas that were explored during two days of discussions on the survival of humans—namely, how can education help us solve our most difficult problems as a species?
We do a lot of experimental software and multimedia projects at EdLab, and we also run the Gottesman Libraries—a local, service-oriented side of our work that keeps us enmeshed in the immediate, day-to-day work of the Teachers College community of 5,000 teachers and researchers. And for the past two years, some of us have been involved in making a “learning theater”—an extension of both the “experimental” and “practical” sides of our work.
Creating a “Learning Theater”
I’ve been deeply involved in this project of conceptualizing, developing, building, and programming the Smith Learning Theater. Indeed, just recently I’ve spent many hours optimizing the workflow of the soon-to-be-completed AV system; multimedia, however, is only one aspect of this expansive project. In light of my recent cocktail party experience, I’ll risk summarizing the purpose and mission of this experimental space as follows:
The Learning Theater is designed as a multi-use space for active learning supported by innovative multimedia technology, a unique software platform, and the most knowledgeable teachers in the world.
(Oh, did I forget to mention that it’s a unique and complex architectural endeavor at one of the world’s leading educational institutions, and possibly the most advanced space of its kind in the world!? That’s right:pretty cool stuff.)
We’ll be unpacking this mission over the next decade, and trying to live up to the potential this space affords us and our collaborators. But if someone asks me right now what that means to make this space work, these are some of the ideas that come to mind:
Exploring the pedagogical and technological potential of such a space with everyone who uses it.
Working smarter, harder, and finding the right colleagues who are willing to undertake this inherently interdisciplinary work.
Taking risks, and resisting institutional pressures that diminish creativity.
Making an effort to share Learning Theater experiences with the wholeworld.
Thoughtfully supporting even modest efforts to use the Learning Theater.
…and rigorously demonstrating how learning happens in an active, comfortable space!
The Learning Theater should change the world. It should change education and, importantly, perceptions of education; it should deepen respect for teaching as a noble, complex, and valuable vocation.
This week I witnessed a handful of caring, thoughtful, visionary, and eminent scientists agreeing that, above all, the well-being of the human race essentially rests on the ability of teachers (of all kinds) to inspire billions of people to be more imaginative, curious, and empathetic.
It’s a complex problem a whole bunch of people need to work together to solve.
When I was 15 years old, I definitely wanted to be Todd Howard:
On November 10, Howard’s latest project arrived like a thunderclap: Fallout 4 is the biggest game his team has ever made, a Skyrim-sized post-nuclear world brimming with more than 100,000 lines of spoken dialogue, coupled to a mammoth crafting system fed by all those wasteland odds and ends players can pluck from dilapidated desks and derelict trashcans.
In other words, he creates vast, virtual worlds for video games. These days I’m not as interested in the virtual worlds, but Howard’s work itself—the work it takes to create those worlds—is very interesting!
I like how Simon frames the issue of participation around the challenge of making it meaningful – because it’s all too easy to create meaningless activities. But at the same time, she suggests, the hooks for engagement have to be simple enough that people are willing to try something new.
That’s tough to do!
I find that easy and interesting are often at odds. For example, our current goal is to use Twitter as a tool of engagement. But what do you ask people to contribute? 160 characters is already technically simple for folks with a Twitter account, but what kind of content should we elicit?
Photo of a library event by Diana Diroy
For me, solving this issue for a particular content is the essence of an exhibition design process – a process that should result in a unique and engaging solution that serves as a great foundation for learning.
One strategy is to aim to make the results of small contributions cumulative – either in a way that creates one large result, or as a mosaic showcasing individual contributions. Another is to make them personal (perhaps identity-oriented is a similar but useful way to think of this).
Another strategy is to offer an extrinsic reward – to offer a prize, for example. But this seems to be less genuine, or at least less likely to relate to learning. On the other hand, this could be a hook that engages a contributor to do more.
Giant Firefly by AMNH
One recent example of a bad interactive solution that comes to mind is from the recent Creatures of Light exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History (sorry guys). While the exhibit had some nice elements, I was disappointed by the gigantic firefly (six feet long?) that hung from the ceiling and glowed at the press of a button (working from memory here) at the entrance of the show. What did this accomplish?
I assume it was supposed to echo the bioluminescence theme of the exhibit, but for my 3-year-old it really just raised the question, “Are fireflies really that big?” I’m not saying that elements need to work for everyone, but really: aren’t there dozens of more exciting ways to show off the mechanisms of science while creating a stronger foundation for learning? (Wouldn’t a six foot magnifying glass aimed at a life-size firefly been many times more awesome? Aren’t there ways to use lighting to better effect?)
Using a traditional exhibition toolbox (scale, lighting, drama, etc.) alongside newer technologies is a big challenge. I’m excited to see what we can come up with here at Teachers College!
I ran across this interesting frog design deck while reviewing trends in design research – a summary of the Design Research Conference 2010 (DRC) last May. A quick glimpse at the slides provides a snapshot of how designers continue to grapple with user needs, and how they respond with both simple and sensible strategies (and more than a handful of rhetoric, too).
At EdLab, our teams often have great latitude in structuring our design processes – indeed, we can change almost every aspect of project management, from inception to final outcomes (and ongoing documentation and reporting). As a consequence, the teams I am a part of – creating diverse software, video, and exhibitions – all work a bit differently. What are the good and bad effects of this freedom? What amount is worth having? To paraphrase Stan Lee:
With great freedom comes great responsibility.
In my everyday work at the lab, I often feel and see the emotional and intellectual effects of shepherding a project through a design process – and negative examples easily come to mind. In considering project work in this way, it is not always clear that it’s a design process per se that leads to each and every outcome (e.g., the emotional response of a team member who feels his or her idea wasn’t adopted), but it seems helpful to consider many (and diverse) aspects of a work environment as part of a design process. In doing so, I hope to assess what structures or freedoms can be articulated as being worth having with a wide range of desirable outcomes in mind.
Consider a common situation: when is a team responsible for documenting its progress on a product? – Every day? Every week? To what extent? And how? What is the cost of this? What is the purpose? What decisions will or could be made as a result of such documentation? A team that has more latitude when it comes to responding to the need for documentation can tailor it to fit the nature of the project. A ready-made rubric, on the other hand, might not allow for the nuances that the team can account for, but I suspect organizations often favor consistency over specificity. In doing so, I wonder what, on balance, they lose. But also: what is the strain on the team that is left to weigh many variables? Such a rubric is a good example of what kind of components constitute a more structured design process.
To better understand the cost of such structures (i.e., monetary cost, but also their effect on goals like creativity and innovation), I have found it helpful to reflect on characteristics of design processes that I value. A few of those characteristics:
Sustained Dialogue: Sometimes it’s hard to keep the conversation going. It’s natural to welcome closure – get back to one’s desk, grab a fresh coffee, check a few items off one’s to-do list. If these external pressures cause a dialogue to end too soon, a lot of momentum can be lost. Worse, the more difficult a conversation is – the more diverse the viewpoints, for example – the more a team might want to close it down. Keeping a dialogue open through (and past) the point where a maximum amount of progress can be made is a challenging task.
Emergent Perspectives: If the goal is to make a new thing (or even revise an old one), it’s often hard to understand what’s possible at the beginning of the project. It is important to have flexibility to learn as you go, though changing directions usually comes at the cost of revising past goals – goals that at least someone on the team is attached to. Perhaps the hardest part of holding up emergence as a component of a design process is knowing when to decide to “stay the course” and deliver a product as-is. There are many examples of how making too much room for change can go wrong.
Discipline: There are a lot of ways to be distracted on a project, but two extremes stand out: 1) being too focused on a small task, or 2) being too focused on the “big picture.” A disciplined designer knows how to weave between these extremes in an iterative, cyclical way. In my mind, he or she carries the weight of at least two traditions at once: a tradition that allows him or her to excel on a small task, as well as a historical perspective that connects the task to a larger purpose.
Short of following a structured design process, cultivating one, or attempting to cultivate one, I expect an organization would articulate habits, dispositions, and behaviors that are valued. But, I wonder, could these characteristic be understood as part of “a process”? And is it beneficial to frame them as such?
“You are innovators” is the message to the teachers at Learning.com‘s second annual professional development workshop in Portland, Oregon. I’m attending the workshop to learn more about their really interesting new software, Sky. I’m also interested to learn if their message to teachers is accurate, a wishful prediction, a hyperbolic marketing strategy, or something else. Working alongside teachers who are learning to use Sky, I begin to hope, will lead me to an answer.
Sky is the name of Learning.com’s recently-launched digital learning environment – which means, among other things, that it’s a platform for teachers and students to access instructional modules (what used to be called curriculum). Using Sky, teachers can create and assign modules (games, animations, links to online resources) to individual students, groups, or a whole class. Each student can go at their own pace or skip around, leaving a trail of data about their learning experiences.
Seeing a group of 50 teachers, librarians, administrators, and other educators learning to use this tool brought to mind a salient issue looming over the education sector: the transformation of the work of teaching from a classroom-based activity to a community-based activity. By this I mean to suggest that the horizon of a teacher’s work is expanding in two senses – both spatially (i.e., a teacher can interact with people in a distant location in a way that is perhaps easier than stepping out of the classroom and walking down the hallway to speak to a colleague) and socially (i.e., a teacher expected to interact with more people than ever).
To anyone who’s interested in education these days, this is not exactly new news. But watching teachers learn to use Sky, a metaphor floated into mind: teachers are being asked to abandon their role as performers. Software like Sky demands that teachers become increasingly like DJs. In short,
Teachers are being asked to jockey media (of all kinds) in the way that DJs jockey music.
Club DJs are very well versed in mixing music to motivate the club goers to dance and drink. Very successful Club DJs can amass real fan followings. Club DJs have historically been on the leading edge innovation when it comes to leveraging the equipment they have for the best new sounds and memorable effects.
Putting aside the goal of dancing and drinking for the moment, the part of this description that strikes me as apt is the effect DJs have on their audience: they are recognized for leveraging the equipment they have for the best new sounds and memorable effects. As companies like Learning.com put innovative software into teachers’ hands, and when these tools further extend the reach of teachers to more and more content (note: I am using “content” and “media” interchangeably, where media puts the emphasis on the diversity of available content), it seems that their role as purveyors of knowledge – and, therefore, as critics and curators of media – is made more pronounced.
Great teaching has, of course, always been about being knowledgeable about, and delivering, content (with bonus points for delivering the right content at the right time). But a significant change that software can make possible is the amount of media that a teacher has access to, and therefore, has the possibility of being knowledgeable about. And this goes beyond mere facts and static content – even beyond dynamic content, methodology, and analysis – and into the area of the learning tools that students can use in conjunction with that content and those processes.
So what are some of the new tricks that Teacher-DJs will have to learn, refine, and become known for? The following come to mind:
delivering simple, efficient, and multi-modal learning activities to students
directing students to great, fresh, and relevant resources
providing a directed (but not inauthentic) way to experience the Internet
sharing responsiblity for student work (and related actions) on school-suported publishing platforms
A related way these changes will likely play out is that authorship will increasingly become an important aspect of teaching. Whether a teacher is authoring content for students, describing and/or reviewing content for fellow teachers, or describing and/or reviewing content for a wider audience (including parents, administrators, and communities), the immediacy (and sheer reach) of the Internet will amplify the importance and potential of this work.
For example, Learning.com has ventured into the realm of positioning teachers within a network powered by sophisticated social software. Using Sky, teachers can create and share lesson plans – lesson plans they may have always had, but perhaps never before in a form that was so ready for sharing so widely. Software features that support searching for, selecting, and rating others’ lesson plans raise the significance of formerly merely digital tools (e.g., putting lesson plans online) to a new level.
An interesting effect of this kind of social software will be that there may be (will be?) increasingly more social pressure on teachers to create and share their work with other teachers. So teachers will be authors not only in the sense that students will use their multimedia assemblages (which seems like a good way to describe their products in software like Sky), but in the sense that other teachers will be able to access their work. By sharing work in this way, and as a community of teachers becomes interested in the depth and quality of a fellow teacher’s work, each teacher may subsequently be judged by it. And though this may have been the case previously on a more local level (e.g., interactions between a teacher and his/her department or administrators), social software is fundamentally changing the professional landscape of teaching by transforming social interactions between teachers.
Understood in this way, it seems that social software is becoming intertwined in what some consider the history of the de-professionalization of teaching. Though, as we see in the comparison to the work of DJs, it is also creating new possibilities of professionalism through a kind of grassroots process – where the day to day work of teachers (lesson-planning) becomes a new kind of lingua franca in valuing a teacher’s abilities and achievements. This is promising stuff. But where there can be little doubt that software like Sky will change teaching, how long it will take for the policies and realities that regulate the day to day activities of students under the watch of lumbering bureaucracies is less clear. And so,
It is still unclear if social software can be a vehicle that gives teachers more power to directly transform the education sector.
Looking into the heart of software like Sky, one sees how teachers are being asked to change the way they work in both obvious and subtle ways. Making a comparison to the work of DJs is, after all, probably not fair. But I think it’s a helpful metaphor. DJs take a lot of pride in their work, and are recognized for their unique contributions to spaces, events, and communities. Rather than evaluating a cultural shift in teaching as a good or bad thing, this kind of lens helps me better understand the kind of work teachers are being asked to do.
Are teachers innovators? Software like Sky gives them an opportunity to innovate. Not all will, but those who do will participate in an interesting transformation – and potentially a watershed period – in the history of the education sector.
Do you create anything, or just criticize others (sic) work and belittle their motivations?
This last missive from Job’s is a nice rejoinder from a back-and-forth with Tate about Apple’s iPad platform (and related technologies). And if you don’t look too closely, you might be impressed by it.
By now it’s well-known that Apple draws the ire of the free software community. But Steve Jobs take the time (here in a private email conversation) to clearly articulate his views and motivations. Really? A CEO taking the time to pursue an email flame war with a spiteful blogger? Very respectable. Admirable, even.
That’s what it seems to take these days to engage the public, especially in the software development space. And I like Jobs’ response and his insistence on participation: he asks (I paraphrase), “Are you at least engaged in similar work?”
But wait, is that enough? Tate started the email thread by criticizing Jobs’ abuse of the language of “revolutions.” Does Jobs offer an adequate defense?
Jobs’ response is related to a too-easy dismissal: “If you don’t do X, you can’t criticize it.” But I don’t think that’s Jobs’ attitude in this case. Tate’s criticism against Apple is steeped in deep knowledge of the software world. I think Jobs’ is asking for empathy, saying (again I paraphrase), “It’s hard to bring these new technologies into the world, isn’t your quibble with us a minor one? Why can’t this discussion be more civil?” Or even, “It’s a mistake to equate what we’re doing here with something important.”
But then that’s why Tate is right and Jobs is, ultimately, a corporate ass: Jobs isn’t taking personal responsibility for his company’s ridiculous (“it’s magical” and “it’s revolutionary”) claims. Jobs’ insistence on deflating the significance of the iPad’s implications for the software community flies in the face of Apple’s language describing it. Once you say it’s revolutionary, there’s no going back and saying that you didn’t mean “in a cultural or political way” (Jobs’: “It’s not about freedom”).
So, frankly, this exchange turns out to be as offensive as it is instructive. I’m glad Tate shared it. Sure, we can empathize with Jobs… it is tough making great things. Especially complex things. But the work of understanding them – seeing their implications, assessing their value, and measuring their impact – is a shared responsibility between both developers and consumers. Indeed, it’s part of the cost of doing business, though easy to forget.
So, how can a development group take responsibility?
Do an impact study and publish it
Build assessment into your development process
Perform ongoing data analysis and research, and share it
And, of course, talk openly with your customers (at least Jobs got that one right!)… with luck, they’ll engage you in a fruitful conversation about culture, politics, and the future.
