We’re interested in exploring how decentralized learning networks might be used to connect educators, administrators, and eventually policymakers and supporters (investors, funders, etc.) in order to spread creative learning practices and to help scale up creative learning approaches. We propose grounding this exploration in a pilot research project focused at first on Nairobi and Johannesburg.

Nairobi and Johannesburg are nascent hubs for innovations in learning. However, educators in both cities (across the two cities and within them) operate in loosely connected circles, with weak tie-ins to each-other for peer-learning, movement building, and shifting norms around learning. Moreover, donors, foundations, and international institutions often invest resources in non-African initiatives (e.g. Bridge International Academies) that are neither progressive nor connected to innovations already happening in these cities.

Building on the work of Aprendizagem Criativa no Brasil (Creative Learning in Brazil – a decentralized network of educators, designers, systems leaders, foundations, companies all involved in or hoping to support creative learning) and other initiatives, we hope to first gather stories of educators across a range of contexts, connect them with one another (including at next year’s Africa Scratch conference), support co-development of resources, and hopefully engage in movement building. 

Our aspiration is to start building a movement with distributed ownership and thick and thin forms of engagement. We’re starting this process by identifying and interviewing a range of stakeholders who might become a part of this network. This ecosystem map (and the one produced by Marian) are initial steps in this process. 

1/ Values

I struggled with this exercise – in some unexpected ways. I’ve helped articulate values in very different contexts and scales (e.g. drafting values for an education startup, a university, a classroom); drafted my own values as part of workshops and trainings; and developed values in very different ways (individually, facilitated, collaboratively, and along different timescales – in a workshop, a week, or stretched out over a few weeks in a deliberate/consensus driven process).

So when I approached this exercise, a few questions came to mind:

• What are the implications of articulating core values? In what ways might articulating values explicitly shape how I work – with myself? With others? How I approach a project? How might articulating values impact different kinds of projects and work (e.g. analytic work, design work, etc.)?
• How have my “core values” changed over time? What has shaped my core values? Prompted changes or shifts, even in emphasis?
• How might core values differ based on context – problem I’m working on, people I’m working with, context I’m working in?

I then reviewed notes from my most recent discussion about values- from a retreat held with the Lifelong Kindergarten Group and the Scratch team. LLK and Scratch have grown immensely in the last 10 years – from a team of graduate students to now a group of grad students and staff that reaches 30 people. And while LLK has some clear values (e.g. approach learning with a playful spirit), none of these values have been written down clearly anywhere – and the retreat provided a first opportunity for the group to begin the process of articulating and consolidating core values.

As I considered this, I realized that we do as a group talk about our values quite regularly – and refer to them in conversation. But we haven’t written them down anywhere. Or consolidated them. But there is a clear sense of a culture grounded in a common sense of values. Of respecting the potential of each person as a creative learner. Of approaching learning in a playful way. Of supporting empowered, non-hierarchical environments over top down conditions. Of being thoughtful and respectful in interactions. Of speaking simply and plainly. Of prototyping and giving ideas form instead of talking about abstractions.

And there are certain affordances that come with not articulating values. There is an emphasis on spending time with people to learn the culture – and that learning the culture takes time, happens through relationship building and working and playing together – and is not something that can happen in a few moments or a day. When I see a list of values, I tend to be like OK, I get it. Not seeing the values suggested to me that I needed to unearth, play with, and experience the values to really get them – which made them something else to me – and has already had an impact on how I work and interact. I find myself using simpler language. Asking shorter questions. Prototyping more.

So why articulate and “codify” values in this context? It’s become clear that as the team has grown – and as relationships become more difficult to maintain in the same ways that they were in a smaller group – articulating values will help us ground how we work, interact with one another, and how we engage external partners and collaborators.

All this said, a few ideas on core values that I’d like to bring to my work generally. These values would likely vary depending on the project or specific context.

Courage: The courage to see differently, to think 10x, and to push and prod those around you – even when it will make you uncomfortable. Courage underlies brave spaces (a more powerful form of safe spaces).

Systematic Rigor: I value work that approaches problems with a longer time horizon, seeks to address root causes, and that intentionally interacts with broader systems. Even efforts that might seem minor (e.g. designing a learning resource) can be made more robust by considering the systems in which it is located (e.g. how designing in particular ways might address inequity). Similarly, this implies also thinking about how an effort or initiative might scale.

Autonomy: people should be supported to be active agents – in their communities, learning, work, and lives.

Tinkering: Complex and simple problems require tinkering – playfully exploring different options and possibilities, testing the, and iterating based on feedback, experience, and data. I try to bring this value to my work in a range of contexts – as it brings together an iterative, experimental approach with a playful mindset.

Inclusive community: My most transformative work has involved bringing together diverse groups of people to create communities where the sum is greater than the parts- and where the parts are transformed to be greater than they were before they joined.

2/ Convening

I’m hoping to organize a convening of people working on education in Johannesburg and in Cairo this December.

Who: I’m inviting people who are doing things that are bold and courageous. Initiatives that don’t simply push for incremental changes to broken systems, but that strive for systematic change. Who am I to define bold initiatives? And who am I to convene a gathering in the first place? Even though this is the first informal step of an effort to start bringing together educators working on creative learning and on radical efforts to shift the education equilibrium, what are the implications of me convening people? How am I working with or layering on top of existing networks?

Where: I’ll likely host this in a space that is convenient for the different organizations – and that enables people from different groups/locales to come (both cities are sprawling disasters). I would also likely pick an organization I’d like to highlight as a particularly strong example of what a radically bold learning initiative might look like.

I would try and design the space to encourage people to be thoughtful in how they interact with others, how they share the strengths of the work and open up on the challenges that they’re facing. I would like them to build relationships and to form a strong sense of community, to be able to trust one another as peers – and to see each other as nodes in a decentralized network – nodes that can empower one another to do greater things.

I hope the space creates conversations that allow for depth – to really push into the texture and contours of a subject, issue, or problem – but to also provide room for exposure and breadth – because the dance between breadth and depth is what makes life interesting and fun. And in this dance, I hope that people can trust each other to be courageous, to challenge one another to rise higher and go deeper than they have before.

Assignment: Write a brief reflection on the in-class design exercise. What are the politics you identified in the artifact your group worked on as it currently exists? How was the experience of explicitly translating the viewpoint you chose into an object? Include photos of your designs.

Group: Kenneth Arnold, Yusuf Ahmad, Abigail Choe, Julie Ricard

We started the reflection by brainstorming the lexical field of words associated with amusement park: adventure, fun, fear, screaming, stress, harm, extreme, entertainment, alternative reality, isolation, remoteness, fence, lines, curves, friends, family, restrictions, centralized, security etc. We started with words close to the etymology  of ‘amusement’ (from the French, “amuser”, to distract pleasantly / in a fun way), then identified that amusement parks were paradoxically associated with another range of emotions, more related to fear, screaming, stress and inflicted harm, which led us to think more holistically about the concept.

From the customer perspective, amusement parks are (supposed to be) an entertaining experience (as opposed to a consumption output oriented), shared with friends and families, triggering (extreme) emotions. It can also be described as a fenced and secured adventure: an alternative reality where you inflict yourself scares but knowing that you are actually safe. Security is actually at the core of the existence and survival of amusement parks. In that way, amusement parks  intrinsically require a strong and centralized management system that is easily identifiable (for liability purposes) but also that can provide customers with the guarantee that their adventure will be harm-free. Moreover, the amusement park business has high costs of entry, as investments to build a park are tremendous and amortizing those costs can take years. More likely, the business model leans towards a small number of (very rich) investors, rather than a multitude of small investors, reinforcing centralization.

Perhaps the most enlightening part of this experience was realizing the authoritarian politics deeply embedded in the nature of today’s amusement parks. If we were to attempt to design within the boundaries of the amusement park as it presently exists, we would be perpetuating that political perspective broadly even if our design work were to locally embody other perspectives. Instead, identifying these hidden assumptions opened up our thinking to alternative approaches to achieve similar goals. For example:

• An overarching otherworldly “theme” or narrative is an allure of many of today’s amusement parks (especially Disney’s parks), but that benefit is achieved through experiences that are centrally designed, tightly controlled, and largely homogenous — essentially authoritarian. Could people enjoy temporarily living a different narrative while retaining their own freedom?
• Many park-goers enjoy the ability to experience extreme sensations and emotions but with essentially ensured safety. Today’s parks achieve this experience by spatially manipulating park-goers’ bodies and putting them in physical spaces where sight, sound, and other senses can be controlled–again, essentially authoritarian. Could people enjoy feeling unsafe-but-actually-safe using technologies that don’t require so much control over their bodies?
• The physical space of a park can evoke a sense of shared travel (to a distant park) and adventure (doing something together with others for a day). But in today’s parks, this space is centrally owned and managed. Could people experience this sense of shared travel and adventure in public spaces instead?

We understood individualism as optimizing for “freedom of action”; in particularly increasing opportunities for individual choice and self-reliance. This doesn’t mean mandating anti-social experiences – some may want to choose to have more social experiences. Instead, it implies removing constraints and enhancing both freedom from and freedom to do what an individual may choose to do.

We considered two approaches to redesigning an amusement park to enhance individual choice and self-reliance.

The first approach involved modifying existing rides. The social nature of amusement parks can constrain individuals. Some people enjoy thrills while others feel more scared, often leading members in a group to compromise by choosing specific types of rides or splitting up into smaller groups. In this kind of amusement park, each seat can be customized to have more cushion or a stronger safety belt. In addition, users have the option to wear an AR headset to alter the view to make the visual environment seem safer or more dangerous, depending on his or her personal preference.

Our second approach to (re)design examined how VR/AR/Mixed Reality might provide a remixable and customizable alternative to amusement parks. Current amusement parks require a lot of space and are usually located far away from residential areas. As a result, it is difficult for individuals with limited transportation or time to go to amusement parks. Moreover, physical parks have significant consequences for the environment (waste, energy needed, etc.). To minimize dependency on location and resources while keeping the thrill and adventure aspect, smaller, more modular amusement parks can be built in escape-the-room formats within urban spaces. This kind of park might not require more than a room, and could potentially actually be used in different spaces.

The focus of this approach would be a mixed reality platform that enables players to choose or design their desired theme, type of puzzles/challenges, and type and level of difficulty, with nearly any combination possible. Moreover, a player could choose to play alone or with others (in the same physical space or online players).

To be clear, the platform functions at two levels – the goggles would enable mixed reality adventure experiences – that apply similar principles of a theme park (fenced experience, safe, but can generate sense of thrill, adventure, of physical sensations), but further enable an individual to customize and create/design their experiences. The design/choice engine is somewhat inspired by Scratch and Glitch – platforms that lower the floors to creation, remixing of others ideas, and of playing with what others have built.

The platform also enables diverse kinds of participation: while many participants may choose to be those captive in the room, others might:

• Design the themed environments, from scratch or remixing and extending existing ones
• Design and implement new puzzles, again with the potential to remix
• Interact with other participants as characters in the themed story, or as “DMs” for some kinds of worlds – if the other participants so choose, of course!

I found this assignment incredibly useful for rethinking some of the problems I’m working on: from problem definition to thinking about the different levers that I might interact with in my work.

The three issues I’ve chosen to discuss here:

1/ Connecting educators: Creative Learning in South Africa and Kenya
2/ Helping teachers and designers unleash their creativity: creative learning design platform
3/ Helping people make sense of the world around them: constructionist media

1/ Connecting educators: Creative Learning in South Africa and Kenya

Nairobi and Johannesburg are flourishing as hubs for innovations in learning. However, educators in both cities (across the two cities and within them) operate in loosely connected circles, with weak tie-ins to each-other for peer-learning, movement building, and shifting norms around learning. Moreover, donors, foundations, and international institutions often invest resources in non-African initiatives (e.g. Bridge International Academies) that are neither progressive nor connected to innovations already happening in these cities.

Building on the work of Aprendizagem Criativa no Brasil (Creative Learning in Brazil – a decentralized network of educators, designers, systems leaders, foundations, companies all involved in or hoping to support creative learning), we hope to first gather stories of educators across a range of contexts, connect them with one another (including at next year’s Africa Scratch conference), support co-development of resources, and hopefully engage in movement building. This leverages a few of the levers:

Code: We hope to design a network that is both decentralized (as opposed to command from the center) and organized by committees in Nairobi and Johannesburg – enabling more distributed ownership while facilitating learning across the network.
Norms: By identifying with the network, we hope to facilitate voice – likely thin at first, but hopefully leading to thicker forms of engagement. We’ve seen this happen in Brazil in different ways – they’re struggling currently as some of the novelty of the program has worn off – a concern Zuckerman raises in his work.
Markets: creative learning is often seen as expensive and/or not useful for employment or “meaningful learning.” By partnering with employers, we can shift “market signals” about the value of creative learning. And by demoing and sharing open-source resources and activities that are free/low-cost, we can show that creative learning doesn’t require expensive equipment and can be done in low cost environments.
Law: In Brazil, the Creative Learning Program sought to build a grassroots movement and generally avoid getting involved in legal issues. However, they had an indirect impact on the law – as schools and cities became known for creative learning, leaders tried to “own” the success by adopting creative learning principles and outcomes into their curriculum. We hope to take a similar approach in Kenya and South Africa – using norms, the market, and code to indirectly influence law. Part of the reason we’re electing for this route is in the light of projects like One Laptop Per Child – which generated deep skepticism in government driven education initiatives. We might, however, use relationships with member companies or MIT to try and mitigate legal constraints to creative learning work.

2/ Helping teachers and designers unleash their creativity: creative learning design platform

Creative learning design can be difficult, particularly when most teachers have primarily been “schooled” in linear, hierarchical environments. While some companies have attempted to support teachers through trainings and creative learning tools, support on design has been lacking. In the US, many teachers need to deliver to the common core within tight constraints, and often lack resources for incorporating powerful learning experiences into these constraints. A few companies, including Learnzillion, have tried to fill this gap through platforms that support design with constraints. However, these tools often still result in instructionist, linear experiences as the code for these projects doesn’t encourage creative learning designs and market incentives push for growth and catering to district level decision makers.

In contrast, I’d like to propose an open-source, nonprofit learning design tool. Modeled on Scratch and Glitch, this tool would enable teachers to remix each other’s lessons, see both the outcome (slides, design) as well as the “code” behind the lesson. Briefly, this would leverage:

Code: designed to encourage remixing of lessons, “blocks” for activities with links to tools and further resources, and potentially slides and other materials generated from this. Basic idea would be that the architecture of the platform would encourage sharing, remixing, and creation in line with creative learning principles – lowering floors to creation while enabling wide walls (for a variety of projects) and high ceilings (for complex projects).
Market: as a nonprofit, incentives would be strongly aligned with designers, teachers, and learners. Partnerships with employers might provide sexy incentives for teachers to engage with the tool.
Norms: Teachers often don’t see themselves as creative. The tool would likely need to include and/or interface with experiences and tools that help teachers see themselves as creative – and enable them to experience what they might design. This could include things like Learning Creative Learning or Getting Creative with Scratch or the Scratch Ed Network – or networks like the one I’ve described above.
Law: This would vary by context. In the US, this would likely require buying districts into this tool. And to remove constraints for lesson experimentation in other places.

3/ Helping people make sense of the world around them: constructionist media

Magnus touches on this in his post when he describes the challenge of people feeling overwhelmed by daily news. Where a number of tools have been developed to try to curate or to aid consumption, I’m more interested in tools that might help people construct meaning themselves from the mass of information – tools that might make it easier to grapple with the world, vast quantities of information, fake news, and feelings of inefficacy.

Code: synthesis is a difficult activity. Current tools for engaging news don’t really help with synthesis or active, creative sense-making. I’m curious as to how architecture for a news platform might enable a more constructive engagement with issues – and help people create and make sense of these issues. For example, instead of disaggregating headlines, the architecture of this kind of tool might borrow from places like Vox or the Crisis Group, while enabling users to manipulate and connect information.
Norms: Our current culture is consumed with surprise and novelty (see Vousoughi et. al 2017 in Science on how false news spreads much faster than true news because of novelty and surprise) over deeper understanding. But people seem to aspire to deeper connections. How might we exploit this tension – between reacting to novelty and desiring depth – to encourage a more constructive approach to understanding issues?
Market: Market incentives encourage novelty. Clickbait headlines abound for a reason – our attention is a commodity that social and news media compete for – which in turns encourages novelty and shallow exploration. How might different norms around consumption (e.g. paying for news as a service instead of paying with one’s attention, similar to sites like Inkl) shape market decisions?
Law: Education seems like a powerful entry point – pilot use of this kind of tool in civic ed spaces and use that in turn to shift norms (toward a more constructive engagement with issues).

Overview

I spent the past four years as one of the curriculum leads for a pan-African university that aimed to create a network of tertiary institutions across Africa. The principle goal of our work was to support young, talented Africans through intentional leadership development, an emphasis on project based, constructivist learning, and exposure to peers and mentors from across the continent and the world. Because of a lack of public investment in higher ed, we elected to go a for-profit route, raising money from mainly US and European investors. While this fueled our growth across Mauritius, Rwanda, Kenya, and South Africa, it also created a tension – pressure to scale and expand, even with patient capital, in the face of fine tuning and refining our learning environment.

Because of the scope of the project, I’d like to focus on a few areas of critique introduced in class.

Problem Definition: Were we solving the “right” problem?

We were addressing challenges related to lack of access to high quality tertiary education: In Sub-Saharan Africa only 9% of people enroll in higher education. Compare that to 27% in India, 36% globally, 48% in China, and 79% in the US (World Bank 2016). And data that we drew on suggested that there was growing demand for tertiary education.

Of the students who do make it to university, many struggle to find jobs. Even the ones who find jobs are often either underemployed or reported as lacking relevant skills, suggesting that tertiary institutions don’t necessarily support students to succeed after graduation – a challenge that we fleshed out more through research into other institutions. We attributed this to four intersecting challenges: (a) Wrong outcomes: Most universities do not prepare students with general problem solving, cognitive, or contextual skills to excel in complex, changing environments and at best do this accidentally (b) instructionist, ineffective pedagogy (c) poor linkages to employers or to career opportunities and (d) high cost of relevant training or opportunities.

However, I think we struggled with scoping the problem. For example, in our early days, we attempted to not only design a curriculum from scratch, but also tried to build important tech systems internally (e.g. a learning management system, admissions platform, etc.), which diluted our resources across a range of complex challenges. Similarly, we increasingly began to delve into diverse offerings beyond our “core” undergraduate offering – corporate short courses, an MBA program, executive courses, a second campus, and finally an unaccredited offering which we hoped to become our engine for growth.

On the one hand, we often created new offerings based on market “pull” (e.g. companies would be thrilled by our interns and then ask us to “do the same thing” for their staff). We also needed to keep generating revenue while our students remained in school (many were able to afford our university due to Income Sharing Agreements) and while we scaled up our numbers. We also pivoted our focus to a lower cost unaccredited offering because of a hypothesis that our main undergraduate offering was too expensive – and therefore our engine for growth would need to come from somewhere else.

While I think we handled the challenges related to outsider perspective (our team hailed from 20+ countries across Africa, 30+ countries across the world, with diverse disciplinary, and socioeconomic backgrounds; we were disciplined in participatory design with students, employers, families, and governments; and regularly adapted our design based on feedback from various stakeholders), I think we struggled most with incentives. Because we were for-profit and venture backed, and despite having patient capital that explicitly supported our efforts to iterate and refine our offerings, there remained pressure to scale before a number of us felt we were ready. Instead of running smaller, lower stakes, in market-experiments, we found ourselves launching larger launches with real students – and while we were open to pivoting and adapting, this urgency to scale often came into tension with efforts to refine.

Lastly, I think we underestimated the value of particular kinds of expertise. While we had a diverse and talented team, few of us had depth in learning design – and were developing these fundamental skills while building our offerings – one of the principal reasons I returned to grad school was to deepen my own expertise in constructionist learning design.

Despite these challenges, the organization is still doing quite well. We’re still being featured quite prominently (most recently on Bill Gate’s blog) – and I’ve seen the impact our work has had on our students and their respective communities (from a student who employees 40 people outside Kampala to students who’ve tinkered with ML and AI to develop all kinds of art and smart agro tech to activists engaged in political reform in South Africa and Zimbabwe). Like all organizations (e.g. similar to Mkopa from last week), we navigated and continue to navigate a range of design tensions. And hopefully will continue to balance these tensions productively.

I love how Salman Rushdie puts it: to understand a life you need to swallow the world. A multitude of things have brought me to where I am today. I grew up as a child of two immigrants, moving around Canada and the US as our family found its footing. Questions about assimilation, socioeconomic mobility, and how identity shapes access to opportunities left an imprint on me pretty early in my life.

I started off in the chemistry lab- fascinated by how interactions in our brain – say the blocking of an enzyme – could have profound implications on sense of self, agency, and action. I took these aspirations to university, where I began to pursue an interest in understanding and influencing brain chemistry. But other experiences kept rubbing against this – including a collaboration with a community organizations in Harlem and reading about contexts of inequity in the US and across the world – pushed me to shift my focus to trying to understand, and hopefully shape some of those structures.

This interest took me from a Public Defenders Office in the Bronx to Egypt where I worked on higher education reform issues during the Arab Spring. After a military coup in 2013, I spent a year in DC researching political reform issues from a comparative lens – with the aim of bringing different discourses of reform into contact with one another (cutting across regional, disciplinary, and thematic boundaries).

I shifted my focus again in late 2014 to join the founding team of a startup pan-African university that aimed to create a network of tertiary institutions across Africa. The principle goal of our work was to support young, talented Africans through intentional leadership development, an emphasis on project based, constructivist learning, and exposure to peers and mentors from across the continent and the world. Because of a lack of public investment in higher ed, we elected to go a for-profit route, raising money from mainly US and European investors. While this fueled our growth across Mauritius, Rwanda, Kenya, and South Africa, it also created a tension – pressure to scale and expand, even with patient capital, in the face of fine tuning and refining our learning environment.

I joined the Media Lab this year to take a step back from the hustle of building an institution – to explore in greater depth how people learn – and how we can democratize the means for creation so that more young people can become creators, not consumers – of not just technology, but the systems and environments we’re immersed in.