Christien Meindertsma hasn't stopped appearing in my life for the past ten days. The TED Talk, above, and her appearance in FastCompany as one of the designers set to save the world are one thing. But her compelling passion for labelling what is known about what everything around us might be made from hasn't stopped ratlling around inside my head. Over three years her quest was simple: to find out how pig parts make the world turn, and start getting people to realise what goes into every object around them.
From meat to shaving brush hairs to bullets, pigs are some of our dearest economic assets, and what do they get in return?
More importantly, though, bullets?! Those are just one of the surprising things in which a bit of pork goes a long way. Her wish that we perhaps knew a lot more about the ingredients of the world around us is a powerful one, as only by knowing can we begin to have meaningful conversations about what sustainability actually means.
Stephen Heppell's use of the word "ingredients" is an intriguing one, too, in reference to learning - he, like me, picks up learning ingredients from all over the world and seeks to blend them into intriguing recipes for those who want to have a taste. But what are those ingredients? Is there a list? A handy set of things that tend to go together well? Other things that have been proven the educational equivalent of basil and coffee (try it - it's awful).
While Christien works on pigs, plastics and plasterboard, I'm going to start compiling my own ingredients lists. You can write your own recipe book with them, and wouldn't it be great if every blog post about good or interesting practice also came with its virtual post-it note of "ingredients used in this learning", and maybe that must-have of "if you can't get hold of this ingredient, then try x - it works just as well".
Free and unregulated cycle schemes sound like an impossible nightmare that we could never really make happen: someone will steal the bikes, they'll end up all over the country. Institutions therefore rally around and make it their business, quite literally, to provide secured bicycles for rental so that people cycle more.
It all seems so logical, but it's the kind of (successful but expensive) thinking from an old model of paternalistic "what can your country do for you", while some of the most exciting ideas, web platforms, institutions and technologies in the past five years have been all about "here's a platform, now what can you do for your country/peer group/friends".
I wanted to explore what a new business model around the old problem of bike sharing schemes might look like.
The $10,000 bike, versus the $150 bike
London's "free" bike scheme cost the locals and sponsors Barclays £25m for a programme that will run for x years. The cost per bicycle is therefore £4166. It's been a hugely successful scheme, with its millionth ride clocked up in just 10 weeks, and hardly any have been stolen (the bikes are a good bit heavier than Paris', where nearly 70% have been stolen or vandalised and required replacing).
But £4166 seems a lot for one bike, with Mayor Boris' £25m giving him only 6000 or so bikes. How much more powerful could things be if we did away with the expensive secutiy measures, expensive (heavy and cumbersome) bikes, big IT that supports such a project (and breaks down) and replaced them with the cheapest bike we can find, no security measures and a good dose of trust in our citizens, providing 163,000 bikes instead?
It wouldn't work here [insert any Western country].
Paris shows us that vandalism and theft of their cute with-basket model was a costly mistake. London has "beaten" its Gaullic neighbour with its highly secure and tech-ed up solution. Countless others, including some who've already tried totally unregulated free cycle schemes, have floundered, seeing all their bikes stolen in months.
But then Mountain View, California, sees its streets relatively free of the automobile (we are in the land of the automobile, after all). Most people opt to take one of the free red-yellow-blue-and-green bikes their main employer leaves unlocked, lying around. Why is Google able to do what entire Governments seem unable to achieve?
Is it cultural? It's partly that, but Google have done something that Governments are notoriously poor at: it's generated the culture it wanted, a culture of mutual respect, a culture of the gift economy, both through its business model, large free lunches and orange juices for visitors, staff and the visitors' taxi drivers, but also through its bike sharing scheme. We'll gift you this bike - and keep replacing them - but in return we ask you not to take us for a metaphorical ride.
And it works. It works, I think, because these bikes are everywhere and they're fun. They've been gifted by a neighbour of yours in the city, not provided for you.
So, if we were to take the Paris or London models, what is the answer to stopping people stealing bikes and having them appear all around the country? I'd argue that if Governments want people to take the bike and not the car, that's no bad thing. In fact, if we can harness thiefs as the distribution network for one bike per citizen, then I'd see more cash heading into the core solution to the problem: more bikes for people who don't yet bike.
As in Mountain View, there comes a point where the proliferation of an idea or an object turns it from scarce valued thing into a commodity. It lets everyone know where the bike came from - it's been beautifully painted in the company colours. Let's get our nations cycling to work (and cycling for play) by making cycling a cheap commodity. We used to give £250 for every child that was born. What would happen if we give a £100 bike for every adult who wants one?
More importantly, though, how could we harness the Google lesson I think I've spotted, in making public services gifted to people, rather than provided for them? What would the social fall-out be in terms of changing this language? What would the advantages be?
Nick Hood suggests that one of the education assumptions we have in the Western world is that education is a right; he asks "what would happen if we said that education was a privilege" or, in Google words, a gift?
Six weeks ago I met Tina Seelig at dinner in Surgeon's Hall, Edinburgh, surrounded by some of the gruesome medical discoveries made over the past 300 years that have helped define modern medicine. If ever there was a dinnertime discussion point about how we build on prior lessons of life (and death), this was it.
We got talking about those life lessons, about how I only worked out I wanted to start my own company about 12 years later than would have been ideal, about how I'd always wanted to write a book ("well, what's the first chapter about?", she asked), and about never getting to the point where you say "I wish I had...".
Tina, in this mini shrink armchair moment, suggested I have a read of her latest book, which I bought there and then on the iPhone and delved into over the course of two evenings.
What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 is a gem, and I've bought at least a dozen copies as 'prizes' for people in my seminars this past month. This "Crash course on making your place in the modern world" is a collection of life lessons, examples from Tina's teaching at Stanford University's School of Engineering, entrepreneurship center and d.school, and great techniques for bringing out the best in yourself and the teams with whom you work. Here are some of my favourite elements of the book:
It's a great book, a quick read but one you'll come back to time and time again when you're needing some clever ideas for motivating a group around a challenge, or looking for some insight in where you go next.
Pic from Stanford BASES, permission pending.
Matt Jones' latest 'make' caught my eye: a shipping forecast rosary. I think it's more the nostalgia of finishing my dinner as a child listening to the exotic and far-flung-sounding German Bight and Fastnet, than any Catholic connotations, but it's also how he created it.
Ponoko allows you to submit your design idea and then, choosing from a wide range of beautiful materials and laser etching options, you can have it quoted, built, posted back to you doublequick. It's beautiful, allowing mere mortals like me to have our ideas made. It's CafePress for making things, as mum puts it.
For schools, I think there's something interesting in allowing that prototyping stage to be sped up. All too often, in the areas where we get closest to student-driven learning where we learn by making things, there is no time, space or money for prototyping several times before making the final product. In Craft, Design and Technology classes we prototype in isolation, theoretically, but then the learning we get from uncovering the real object is lost.
I don't think Ponoko is necessarily the answer, but I do love the speed element and the community of makers they're building up to help transform ideas into workable product. There's got to be a learning oportunity in there.
Two education change events in Scotland, within six days, handling some of the core issues we face here, and elsewhere, to make learning relevant, compelling and delightful for our young people. Yet the people who really need to take part in the conversations, parents and classroom teachers, would have been either working or taking a well-earned vacation. Houston, we have a delivery problem. The customer happens to be out.
This is why I've started planning the "Jamie Approach" to educational change, an ode to that faux-cockney who's wowed TED (do watch the video, above, and save a child from diabetes or premature death), brought school dinners to their knees across the UK and has attempted to turn Huntington into the healthiest city in the US.
The challenge with any educational change discussion is that the space in which it operates defines who hears the message and takes part in the converation. I'm a fan of spaces, for digital work or physical environment building.
Where does this education change conversation already take place?
Secret spaces: Educational elites form and use both the secret space of bar-room chat, email and text message to work out what 'they' want out of the system.
Group spaces: Facebook groups, Classroom 2.0... all these group spaces have worked well for the past two or three years in harnessing those who are already bought into the change process.
Publishing spaces: for up to ten years many of us have been sharing our outlooks and ideas in the hope that someone will listen, primarily through our blogs and podcasts.
Participation spaces: other than the wiki, which presents a skills challenge, we've not really capitalised on markets, meetings or events not related to educational change to champion these conversations. Hmmm.... a potential opportunity.
Watching spaces: nowhere has managed to take the debate to the masses, other than the recent US examples of Waiting for Superman and NBC's Education Nation, which have been met with cries from the educational bourgeoisie of being an unfair representation of the profession etc etc etc... But it's still the best way to meet the masses - through the most popular of our glowing rectangles.
I want to take these conversations into the places where most 'real' people, that (I hate the term) "silent majority" who would like to be heard. And I think that common ground, the place we all inhabit at least once a week, is the supermarket.
I could be terribly wrong. I've been terribly wrong in the past. But this feels logical. After all, it's the place where my parents, teachers in a small town school for 30+ years, met most of the parents of their students, ironed out disputes, got feedback on their teacher, received pearls of wisdom on how to turn wee Johnny around. Why can't we consider going back to that village utility of the grocery store or supermarket as the common ground on which we discuss what really matters: how teachers teach, and how learners learn?
I want to see a nation who, weekly, meet at the frozen peas, the stack of bread or the cheese counter, and, through these social objects, start making happen these necessary changes we've all talked about for years.
So, Tesco, Asda Walmart, Sainsbury's... which one of you big boys wants to be responsible for changing the British education systems wholesale-through-retail?
Discussions about how attention, finance and effort get spent on educational technology at a national level in any country all too often get drawn into a "We're right, they're wrong" play-off. It's been hard trying to formulate some thoughts after a meeting I was invited to last week by the Scottish Government. In Scotland, on the back of one day, at least, I felt the beginnings of a crack of enlightenment in some frank, sometimes painful discussions about where Scotland's educational technology line of vision might head in the future.
The discussion was conducted under Chatham House Twitter rules, in that the points from the discussion could be made public, but the person from whom they emaninated not. It meant that we were able to call it as it was, challenge and question each other for more detail. It does, though, make blogging about the experience tricky. I've been stung too often in the past from people with agendas, journalists who want to just make stuff up and those who oh-so-wisely but oh-so-naively believe it, by those who hear but do not listen.
There are some good roundups of the content of the day, and some of the discussions:
Instead of duplicating those points, I think I'd like to dump some perhaps unrelated thoughts that came up through the afternoon discussion I was part of, looking at learning from a student's perspective and thinking about what that might mean for a national technology for learning strategy.
1. Do we need Big IT doing stuff for us, can we just do it ourselves, or is there a sweet spot somewhere inbetween? With me on the day was Andrea Reid, a Quality Improvement Officer from the south of Scotland, and in her summary of the day she quotes one of her students, summing up a latent tension any centralised or national technology initiatives hold:
I was with a group of P7s and part of their group getting over a high wooden wall, with no footholds ( about 12 feet). It was one of those team efforts where everyone had to get to a platform on the top, and I promptly interfered and gave advice. One boy took himself out of the group and wandered off to the side – completely adamant he wasn’t getting involved. Eventually he came over and said to me – “Look when you stop helping us I’ll get involved.” Point duly taken I backed off and he worked with the others to get everyone over in a really fast time. His leadership and collaboration with the others was outstanding. At feedback later his comment to me was "When you learn to trust us to solve our own problems, you’ll find we can do it and even if we can’t we’ll have tried our best". Clever boy, who had been really hard going in class previously – disengaged and hard work. Big lesson for me…
The assumption that Government knows the problems that need solved and then goes in to sort it all out is one that has blossomed in the last dozen years or so. But, as we hit these times of austerity, it's the lack of cash to go around that's forcing (or allowing us to take advantage of) an attitude of "it's not what your country can do for you, it's what you can do for your country".
Does Government not have to think about how it goes about Big IT, and whether it goes about Big IT projects at all? There were as many of us wanting to see an increased role of an open marketplace as having more investment in the state-run Glow learning platform, in a "where would you put your money" exercise.
2. National technology for learning projects that are about connecting learners, parents and schools seem to have forgotten something: Facebook has all the mechanics required to do this, and the critical mass to make discovery of others easier. Facebook might only be useful for the adults and older students amongst our learners, but where it fails, Moshi Monsters, Club Penguin etc come to fill in the gap. Could we not harness the open market better, rather than trying to compete against them?
3. "Safe" is the (wrong) key word of most national learning technology initiatives. In Scotland, the 'safety' of Glow has been over-stated, and has been used as a crux by some to avoid delving into the issues that Facebook and other social networks and virtual worlds bring in the real world, both for adults and for children.
4. No online service should ever be so unintuitive and hard to use that it requires training to learn how to open it, let alone how to harness it for deeper or more collaborative learning. Design is vital, and has been ignored - is still ignored - in national education technology projects. Get BERG to do it right.
5. The underlying problem for national education technology has nothing to do with technology. We're solving the wrong problem by throwing money at training and code, when the real problem lies in collaboration itself. Collaboration across age, stage and school subject gets more difficult from nursery onwards. Nursery is the fragile balance between schooling, play and life-learning that we should struggle to maintain throughout formal education. Until we get to grips with how to better plan learning, particularly in secondary education, then the vast majority of "collaborative" technology is a wasted effort. We should be looking at how we can have more schools consider their curriculum through the lens of a learning wall, how they can generate truly student-led learning.
6. National collaborative technology projects assumed that the gatekeepers - parents and teachers - think sharing is a good, worthwhile activity. Sharing is a good thing, and is the lifeblood of great creative ideas (no hyperlink to prove it - there's a ton of literature and evidence out there; start off with my delicious links if you like). But vast swathes of teachers don't think so. If there are still relatively few teachers sharing on weblogs, for example, it has nothing to do with the weblogs or other choice of sharing tool, and everything to do with their perception that spending some time thinking, reflecting, committing to (e)paper and sharing that with as wide an audience as possible is a futile, useless, time-consuming activity that competes with many others of greater perceived importance. It would be worth £35m working out how to crack that one first.
7. National technology projects have largely failed to delight. The reason games-based learning is so popular in the past four years more than any four year period prior to this is down principally to the exponentially improving field of video game narrative, graphic, motion controllers, augmented reality and storyline. The second key ingredient in helping this culture spread is a committed (but tiny) team of individuals who can help empower teachers to weave their own stories around those video games, and in turn inspire learners to do the same. Had the Consolarium team been peddling ZX Spectrum text adventures in 2010 I doubt there would have been the same excitement and tremendous uptake of a new set of contexts for learning.
Great technology and national condoning and pushing of it have combined to delight.
While social networks, virtual worlds and social media have been delighting growing numbers since 2005, national technology projects have tended to not only fail to condone their use for learning, but to distract potential users - publish here, not there, they try to persuade us. "Facebook is used by teachers for their personal lives, not for learning" I've been told. But I don't play video games to learn, either, yet I and many others are happy to harness them for learning in a different context.
8. National technology projects tend to see decisions made on beliefs and passions, not on transparent data. I want Glow's homepage to tell me:
- monthly unique visitors
- segementation of visitor types: teachers, learners, parents, admins, LTS staff etc.
- number of pages served
- dwell time
- number of unsuccessful log-ins
- bounce rate
- percentage of returning visitors each month
- peak user access times
- key pages served
I then would love to see data-driven decisions taken as to whether certain elements of Glow are working or not, and a weekly or monthly trial of new ideas to see if the public bite. If data is made public then we can see the rationale for decisions, rather than seeing them being made on gut insinct, the legacy of the project's history or who has been involved at any one point. I could ask for that information monthly on a Freedom of Information request. Or we could just see the decision-making process as transparently as it should be.
9. In Scotland we tend to be happy with being the first in the world, not the best in the world. Glow was the first national schools intranet. It might be the last, too. The implication is that an intranet is the best medium through which to connect learners, teachers and parents on a learning journey. Why is it? It may not be.
Is there something less compelling about the International School Bangkok's portal of learning that Jeff Utecht has kicked off, connecting to the world, where every student and teacher regularly contributes their learning to each other (and anyone else who wants to listen in) through freely available and free platforms?
Or what about the part automated, part teacher-produced feedback mechanisms of the Indian Mindsparks platform, letting students learn new concepts and reinforce their classroom learning on their own terms?
Or what about the transformative power of a teacher simply sharing to the world, in the form of video, what he and his students have made over a week: a village on stilts anyone?
Tinkering School 2010 Seniors - Village Building from gever tulley on Vimeo.
By limiting ourselves to promoting so heavily what we were the first to produce we limit ourselves away from harnessing the great new platforms and communities that others have forged and which are quietly thriving.
10. In 2005 there was little truly great content on the web. In 2010 we're spoiled for choice. Having great content was one of the things Glow was sold on - successfully - in the early days. Like so many other things, the world changed faster than we could have imagined. TED Talks alone prove the huge value we place on world class content but, unlike much of its education content provider cousins, TED found a business model that allows it to make this learning material free, joining its closer cousins MIT Open Courseware et al. As YouTube seeks out new ways to let us rent or borrow content as and when we need it, what role is there left for a tiny national schools intranet as the curator of 'quality' content? Can one group of curators, however greatly qualified and localised in viewpoint, beat the cream of the world's global curators?
11. We don't want to consume content. We want to learn through experiences whose context is relevant and meaninful to me. Too many have told me about their Glow training sessions with this phrase: "We were told that 'this is how you put up your PowerPoints or class notes for everyone to see." The fact is, this is not the kind of learning we want. If someone feels that their learning can be swiftly and easily uploaded to a site in the form of a PowerPoint or worksheet then something is wrong. How can an online experience back up and augment the real world experiential learning we see in some of our best schools? How can that experience each child experiences differently be represented, shared and developed after the fact? It's certainly not through document stores and half-empty forums.
12. We want a sense of audience - sometimes that's beyond our class, school or country. The biggest challenge with any national platform is going to be that word - national. Our students are already empowered to go international every time.
The Seven Spaces of Technology in School Environments from Ewan McIntosh on Vimeo.
Matt Locke originally came up with the concept of the Six Spaces of Social Media. I added a seventh earlier this year, Data Spaces, and have played around with how education could harness these spaces, and the various transgressions between them, for learning.
This short presentation tackles the potential of adjusting our physical school environments to harness technology even better. What happens when we map technological spaces to physical ones?
I've been a Fellow of the RSA (Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) for nearly three years now, and have spent 2010 on the advisory board for its Opening Minds Curriculum, which relaunches this year and next with added support for those seeking new models for the new education paradigm.
It is therefore timely, with a first relaunch event this Tuesday in Birmingham of the Opening Minds Curriculum, that Sir Ken Robinson's seminal (but probably not viewed enough in education circles) RSA Vision Talk has been transformed into a shorter RSA Animate sketch.
He delves into the myth of ADHD, the importance of the aesthetic senses, waking up learners to find what they have within themselves, and how we collaborate. Go on. Watch it.
School buildings as influencers of future practice, not responsive to existing practice
Digital land knows no boundaries of space, time or geography. The effect on learning in the past three years, in particular, has been profound, though not necessarily on learning in schools. More have arguably expanded their horizons through 20 minutes of TED Talks than 20 minutes of most chalk and talks or classroom activities.
Apply the principles of digital development to physical learning spaces, though, and we can imagine a totally different means of designing and constructing new schools, where the physical space takes on a role as vital as the technology itself in pushing on teaching and learning practice in schools by leaps and bounds. The moment for this type of thinking is ripe. It is now.
When we moved from Big Things For People to Enabling People To Make Big Things
Until about three years ago it still appeared acceptable for big organisations like Governments and their myriad of flabby institutions to create Big Things That Do Wonderful Stuff For People. It was a world of impressively large contracts, the Adam Smith notion that public services can only be made affordable if centrally purchased at driven-down prices and provided by private companies or grey-haired civil servants with, preferably, more than a couple of decades experience in delivering product or initiative.
Then we ran out of money.
And we started to pay attention to what had been going on out on The YouTubes and The Facebooks.
The internet showed that scale existed best when it came from tiny startups with big imaginations and no experience, given backing by those with the cash to explode their ideas to the big time but without their meddling (sleeping investors with great black books of contacts are the dream ticket in this land).
These billionnaire twentysomethings have shown that the money isn't in Big (Expensive) Organisations (with Committees, Stakeholders and more pdfs of policy than you could ever read) Do Stuff For People. The money shot was in Tiny Groups inventing Platforms That Allow People to Create Great Things For Themselves. JFK was a startup 40 years before his time: It's not what your country can do for you, it's what you can do for your country.
Now, architects, school planners and builders will still make a lot of money for a reasonably long time by procuring large contracts for many schools. But the clever ones will see the opportunity in thinking more like a startup and designing schools that are not designed around how teachers teach and students learn, but around how they could teach and how they could learn. The way architects pose their questions during initial consultations are hugely important. There's a difference between:
"What kind of building would help you teach and learn better?"
and
"What kind of teaching and learning would you like to do, and what things could we help with in making that happen?"
There also has to be a healthy dose of "gifting innovation", in never assuming that every building user or school-goer will know how far they could go. In fact, a good session of Best and Worst is a good way to help drop the "what I think I should be saying" and give way to the "what I really want is" conversations.
This is the kind of conversation that at least begins to turn the table from "let us deliver you a great building" to "let us work together to change the way we teach and learn in this place, with the building as one of its foundations".
They'll also have discovered formulae that permit the space to be changeable, on the whim of its project-based, student-led occupants' ideas, to be a nest-like room for one project, and a pirate ship the next.
The Nest Room at Wieden+Kennedy's office, with its stone-like comfortable sofas: schools could create rooms like this on a whim, to suit the project students have chosen to undertake at any given point. Pic from Tina aka the Swissmiss.
Living Learning Buildings
It takes between 3-5 years to plan and build a new school. That means that the buildings being opened this semester were kicked off in an era that maybe didn't yet know YouTube, and almost certainly hadn't logged into Facebook for the first time. They didn't know what a QR code was or how augmented reality could turn a blank wall into a webpage, into a video or into the view outside. Imagine a school whose best work and most intriguing learning failures could be viewed by passers-by through their mobile phones - a living learning building:
N Building from Alexander Reeder on Vimeo.
No, we were designing schools with steel and glass but essentially, by and large, the same spreadsheet-to-foundations layout inside.
The media world has worked out how to harness the user - education's got a thing or two to learn from it
The media world has been able to move from its equivalent of concrete foundations - the broadcast television show - to create new forms of interactive, co-created, crowdsourced- cohabiting with professionally-produced content. Aleks Krotoski's treatment of the BBC's Virtual Revolution is a textbook model of how a professionally produced doc is made better by giving all its ingredients away to the audience/users.
The approach of those schools who are able to "professionally produce" student-driven learning shows the same adaptability of pedagogy, notably from my recent trips in Albany Senior High, Auckland. Gever Tulley's Tinkering School and the kindergarten kids in Lanarkshire, Scotland, are further examples of what's possible when you reverse the point of the professional in the room: the professional is there to "tilt projects towards completion", as Gever puts it, not professionally produce the learning and 'deliver' it to learners:
When Tim Rylands was sitting with his students, rather than leading them from the front, in his immersions into the world of Myst, he was also changing the model into one of empowering the user/customer/learner to create great things for themselves.
And so to schools' physical spaces. This, in too many "award winning" school plans I've seen, is what is considered a must-have:
Even if not laid out in quite as uninspiring a way, the metaphor of this photo stretches into nearly every school and university. It's a space designed for something, but it's not anything that resembles how we really use technology when in the same room as other people. Let me explain.
The Seven Spaces
Matt Locke kicked off with six spaces of digital media that provided a framework for thinking about the media without having to refer to brands (it helps avoid what I call "The Hoover of the Internet" problem when we hear people talking about Facebook, when they really mean social networks, or talking about Google when they really mean... well, it could be anything). Last year, I added a seventh: data spaces.
When we look at the digital media we interact with, with whom we interact in each space and what that looks like in a physical environment, we start to see that these seven spaces provide a fresh format for asking teachers, parents, students and others what they would like to do in a new building, and then design a flow between the right mix of spaces for the projects they will undertake.
Secret Spaces
Examples: SMS, IM
Think about how you sit when you're texting someone. Go on, text someone now and get someone to photograph you. Now stand up, go for a quick walk around the room, and start looking up a webpage on your mobile phone. Get another photo taken. What do you see? When we're engaged in secret spaces (sending text messages to one other person), as opposed to public publishing spaces (like a webpage or even sending a 'text' to our hundreds of Twitter followers) our body language is totally different.
Therefore the consideration of physical space has to be made. In schools, where are the niche-ing private, secret spaces where we can curl up to text, read a book, perhaps read material that we wouldn't want our peers to see us read (thick books when our friends think it's uncool to read 'proper' books, sex education materials and advice books or websites)? Privacy is hugely important to teens in particular, more than adults tend to comprehend.
Maybe we need to think about temporary secret spaces, like the inflatable igloos of Glasgow's Saltire Centre?
Secret spaces needn't be unsafe, either. Take the most secret space we currently have, the WC, and you can see that, by placing the doors to open into a communal area we turn secret into public swiftly, without compromising either.
Group Spaces
Examples: Facebook, Myspace, etc
Digital group spaces work because they're engaged around one thing, and one thing only: how can we help people to find their friends and engage with them in sharing and conversation? Take Facebook's features, and you'll see that all of them, from the wall of friends' posts on login, to even the advertising, are geared up towards this goal.
Again, in school, it seems like most spaces, indoors and out, are geared up to making this virtual "gathering around the fireside" hard or impossible to achieve. Whether it's the distinct lack of outdoors seating areas that, if they're there, are set to face at opposing angles (and thus de-facilitate conversation) or desk and seating arrangements contrived to make us all face one way, or meet considerable pain in trying to shift things around, or even down to the de facto reasoning given for having 25-year walls separating our classroom spaces, school spaces are generally designed to stop people collaborating or talking to each other.
(image from Gareth Long)
The d.school at Stanford is one place, though, that realises less is more when trying to harness the existing groups and communities in our schools - leave the space as wide open as possible and provide the furniture, objects, lighting or moveable, hanging walls that are required on the side, and on wheels. Take a look at my photo set from an impromptu visit last week with Head Royce School's Head, Rob Lake, as we sought out how his school could change its learning spaces to in turn enable some amazing changes in curricular approach:
Want a wall? Take one. Need to gather folk around? Bring your own seat. Want a 'secret' space in which you can hide a bit? Make one. Need more whiteboard? Paint some. The Glasgow Saltire Centre continues this idea with its on-wheels moveable Palm Tree lighting, moveable inflatable igloos and little niches.
Publishing Spaces
Examples: Flickr, Youtube, Revver, etc
Online, when we publish a blog post like this or put up a photo on Flickr, we're hoping that people might find it. We're publishing, flinging it out there and hoping it sticks. The providers of publishing spaces have, over the years, done as much as they can to help these publishing spaces leak into other spaces, or transgress, so that blog posts are sent out to Twitter with ease, which in turn sends them to my friends' groups on Facebook and into individuals' RSS readers.
In schools' physical spaces, this for me is about how digital artefacts of learning can be shared through the building space, much like in the video above where Tweets from within a building are broadcast to its shell and viewed through mobile phones.
Performing Spaces
Examples: MMORPGs, Sports, Drama
Performing spaces allow people to be someone or something they are not. In World of Warcraft you can be grouping with hundreds of other warriors to win battles of epic proportions, while by day you're a computing science teacher.
In buildings, these performing spaces are traditionally seen as epic concert halls. Stanford's latest addition in the Bing Hall is one such epic extension to the learning environment. But these tend to be reserved for those who are not performing in a way that allows them to be something they are not - these spaces are about encouraging and showcasing those who have already worked out that they can be what they dreamed of being.
I wonder what the opportunity is for transforming learning spaces into temporary universes where we can immerse ourselves in a "imagine if" environment. It could be the nest room example, above, or it might be trying to offer buildings that enhance what great languages teachers, for example, have always done - create a feeling of entering into a parallel, slightly exotic French, German, Spanish or Chinese environment.
When the Bassetti architects gang explained how they created 5, 10 and 50 year walls in their school, each designed in a different way to be altered at those periods, I wondered what this might look like on more of a micro level, within one particular learning space. What are the 6-week, 12-week and one school year learning spaces we want to create for our student-led, project-driven work and what affordances do we require?
Maybe it's about turning school buildings into more of a game, especially for those who are new to them. I wonder what inspiration could fill a school build by drawing on the father who, when refitting his Manhattan pad, placed scores of quizzes, nooks, crannies and secret spaces within it for his daughters to discover their new home.
Participation Spaces
Examples: Meetup, Threadless, CambrianHouse.com, MySociety
MySociety were behind one of the most exciting projects that took place while I was at 4iP: Mapumental drew together every public transport timetable in the UK, every house price and a 'scenicness score' to offer an invaluable service to those seeking to move house for a new job. The video explains:
The last element of this project, the scenicness score, is the one where a participation space was created - that is, the scores were not decided by a jury, they were decided by bored office workers the country over who offered up a segment of their time to participate in the creation of a database of information. The project was actually a reasonably compelling game, ScenicOrNot.
In school buildings, what might these participation spaces look like? Well, continuing the MySociety fascination with open data, it might be in providing relentless data points where current energy consumption and production of the school can be monitored and added to or acted upon by any student. So far, some schools such as Gullane in East Lothian have got as far as showing the data of their energy consumption and production, but few if any have gone as far as creating a participation space where the community can actually use that data to change their actions or realise the impact of existing actions on the environment through their participation.
Or maybe it's as simple as looking to the creative industries to see the spaces in which they work and how they harness them. When IDEO employees meet to solve a problem, it's not clear where the boundaries of certain space and employees' ownership of that space lie.
And why are we not turning our school yards and grounds into Edible Schoolyards, the ultimate in participation spaces, surely, where we no longer pay for groundsmen to mow immaculate lawns but turn the entire space into a community garden that feeds the school and teaches us all about the sustainability issues of organic food?
Watching Spaces
Examples: Television, Cinema, Sports, Theatre, etc
Finally, watching spaces. These are the ones schools are probably most geared up to at the moment. However, if we change everything about the school from the norm being the front of the classroom to the norm being having no 'front' in the classroom, then we have a wonderful opportunity to really celebrate the great lecture for what it is. TED Talks have proven the global appetite for superb, but short, lectures. And yes, even youngsters are blown away by the performance of an amazing speaker.
By making the norm in schools one of collaboration and teacher as a guide, "tilting towards completion", then we can afford to create genial spaces for lectures, spaces that thrill and delight and celebrate those occasional moments of lone insight that only a real, living, flesh and blood teacher or visitor or student could ever offer.
Changing our approach to building school spaces in this way isn't easy, and it's a real chicken and egg as to "what comes first". The fact is, we need to consider building our bricks and building our curriculum at the same time. We need to be constructing learning walls with our teacher and student peers, but also with our architects and builders. We need to be looking at how our timetables can move from 45-minute, 90-minute or 2-hour chunks into something more akin to the flow we have when in the midst of a longer project (or blog post ;-). How could a building redesign bring us closer to the kind of learning flow achieved at the Stovner school in Oslo with a timetable like this? :
Want to discuss this more? Have a read of The Third Teacher, and visit my friends at Cannon Design, Bassetti, the Academy for Global Citizenship (started aged 23 by the amazing Sarah Elizabeth Ippel) or my own delicious links on building schools.
Tune into our Rebuilding the 21st Century Classroom and Student-led Learning Sessions at Bahrain's The Education Project this coming weekend.
The Tinkering School's Gever Tulley joins me on my panel at The Education Project in Bahrain this week. Tune in Sunday October 10th where I'll be tweeting and hopefully live streaming our panel on how students can lead their own curriculum by playing around, and with another group we'll attempt to rebuild the 21st Century Classroom.
