[staff] Notes from Wakatta
Below are my notes with some background from the first Wakatta design charette, supported by some relevant Calvin and Hobbes strips my son asked me to read the following day:
On Thursday and Friday, March 12th and 13th, I was invited to participate in a design charette held at the New School (if you don’t know what a charette is, don’t worry - just read on). The university building supporting the event, once a popular department store, is slated to be knocked down any day. This was a perfect metaphor for the goal of the event - work with two dozen or so other learning institutions around New York City, such as museums, libraries, after school programs, etc., to explore how learning in our city could be transformed if we built a cross-institutional, youth-centered network using digital media.
The project, named Wakatta (“I get it” in Japanese) issued the following challenge to the illustrious participants in the room:
More specifically, our first of two days together was designed to address the following challenge:
It is an exciting proposition and proved to be a fascinating two days. Even more exciting, we knew we were doing more than just batting around ideas that would be shoved in a drawer and forgotten at the end of the day. MacArthur’s eyes are on the group and its process, with a budget no doubt somewhere ready to fund a solid idea, should one eventually emerge. When Global Kids first received funds from the Foundation’s once-new Digital Media and Learning Initiative, our support was rare in that it forced us (to our delight) to connect with other grantees. It seems MacArthur is in a new phase and developed enough solid work that it’s time to support more of its grantees to collaborate, Wakatta being just one example. That is a good sign.
The room was split into three, my assigned working group composed of individuals from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, The Queens Hall of Science, The Joan Ganz Cooney Center, and the upcoming African American Art Museum and formerly of the Museum of Natural History. The room was full of other museums, non-profits, and libraries as well. Smart, fun folks.
Before the meeting a sample set of ideas was sent around, to get the juices flowing. That led me to enter the gathering with the following key questions for such a network:
My goals for the network, or guiding questions, included:
Our first brainstorm was around ideas for the network. I thought we generated quite a few rough good ideas, including the following:
Clay Shirky came to speak to use about his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Amongst other things, he told us about a college student who got in trouble when he made a Facebook study group. The school said it was against the rules, as it was a form of media. The student said it was not against the rules, as a study group could happen in person or online. Shirky said what Facebook is most like is neither of the two but… Facebook! This reminded me of my recent blog post No Respect: Devaluing the Consequentiality of Online Communities so I asked him to comment. His response was quite interesting.
Clay said we can not get those who don’t understand the value of the online affordances without their experiencing it first. They have to play the games. They have to get on Facebook. And if they won’t, he essentially said, we have no choice but to wait for them to get out of power or we have to go behind their backs and just do what needs to get done.
I was most interested in what he has learned from his students, most of which have been born after 1990, for whom the Web and the Internet are as integral to their lives as telephones were to my generation. He criticized as unfortunate those, like himself, who spoke of cyberspace in the 1990s as a separate and idealized places for human interaction for causing much of this confusion. For his students today there is no cyberspace. It’s just their life. And someday, not so far out, it will be seen as no different than the telephone - just a regular part of our lives and how we communicate and work.
My group combined a number of our ideas and learned that one of the other two groups had a similar idea. Together we created a conceptual prototype which we then presented to 18 or so youth who came to critique. The youth were excellent - a diverse group of sharp thinkers who wanted to help us do right by them.
Gonzalo, from the other group, and I led our presentation. Before I conclude I wanted to share the questions we asked the youth at the outset, and a few of the answers I recall us writing on the board:
1) Who decides what you learn? (e.g. teacher, the DOE, the government, my mom, myself, librarians, football coach)
2) Where does this happen? (e.g. school, home, libraries)
3) What are you not allowed to learn in these places (e.g. architecture, skateboarding, how to fight)? Why?
4) What do you do about it (e.g. teach myself, go on the internet)?
5) What if we supported you to be in charge of WHAT you learn, WHERE you learn, and HOW you learn? What would you need from us? (e.g. to be listened to)
Next month our group will gather and further refine our ideas; in June, I suspect a youth charette will be attended by youth from across our institutions.
Very interesting. Worth watching.
