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).