Category Archives: Play

In Search of Agency

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It sure seems like a lot of things just happen to people. You know, beyond our control and all. We’re well-intentioned, and rocking along, and all of a sudden, but on a pretty regular basis, something just happens.

And we are helpless in the face of all this happening stuff. Right?

Of course not, but when it comes to teaching and learning, I have come to see that way more often than I’m comfortable with, teachers and students alike just let their schooling happen to them rather than acknowledging that they have control over what and how and even when they learn. Even in the face of mandates and political pressure. Even then.

But folks feel helpless more than I think they actually are.  Learning, or school, or whatever, seems to happen to them, rather than the other way around.  It’s supposed to be the other way around.  Folks are supposed to own their actions and habits and the way they spend their time.  And our culture too often supports passivity and compliance.

I feel like folks forget they are the agents of their experiences.  We have agency.  Power. Control.  Maybe not over everything that happens.  Certainly not all.  But over more than we realize more often than not.

So how might we work to build agency in teachers and learners?  Let me simplify that question – how can we help folks develop the ability to recognize the constraints of a situation and to begin to play with them?

As I delve more into elements of play and hacking, and even maker culture, it seems to me that there’s fertile ground there.  Play, if you recall, is the ability to move freely within constraints.  Hacking is the ability to see the system – and a problem with it – and work to improve it.  Making is creating.  It’s fiddling with the constraints of lots of different systems.  Yarn.  Blocks.  Food.  Circuits.  Classrooms.  Textbooks.  Laws.  Whatever.

Hacking and making and playing are how you figure out where the constraints are, and how you might be able to fiddle with them.  As well as what happens when you do.  These skills/habits/attitudes/frames of thinking are useful when thinking about developing agency.

That was where I got to in my wondering and thinking when it was time for Michelle and Kyle and I to think about what we’re going to work on next.  And then I got a whiteboard pen in hand.  And we did this1:

Enter hacking/making/playing. Or, more specifically, Hack/Make/Play.  It’ll be a multiple day and ongoing PD experience that we do in the district.  In conversation with other folks. If school’s but one node in the learning networks of children, well, we want to play nicely with the other nodes.  And we want to use our time with teachers to help them make things.  To help them understand how to identify building blocks.  And to help them figure out when and how to take things apart and put them back together differently.

Building on others’ successes in maker and hacking spaces, and on the idea that learning is, to some extent, playing with information, deconstructing and reconstructing it, we would like to create some professional learning experiences that would help people to begin to feel equipped, and to a more important extent, empowered, or permissioned, or whatever the word is for “it’s okay to do this”-ed in order to build those senses of agency for teachers and students and anyone involved in learning.

Right now, it’s just notes on a board.  And messy ones.  We started thinking about a week-long camp.  But that wasn’t right.  We want lots of entry points into this kind of thinking.  Lots of ways to engage and get involved.  So the “days” I spell out are probably not going to happen sequentially.  We don’t know yet.  But I do think that each of them is a kind of entry point.  Hacking the Web seems an important way of thinking.  Making stuff another.  Hacking curriculum?  Well, you get the idea.

The essential question at the bottom is, I think, the big piece – “How do I approach a system to determine where my agency lies?”  If you’re able to play, you can see the constraints.  To see them, you’ve got to know how and where to look.  Hacking, making and playing seem to be useful ways to answer that question.  Not the only ways – not everyone needs to play with Picocrickets, or build toy cars.  Heck, the knitting circles I’m familiar with in our district likely embody the ethos we’re aiming for.  Everyone needs to be making something.

Over the next several weeks, we’ll begin to flesh it out and look for the connective tissue that will hold various groups of hackers, makers, and players around our district together.  In some cases, we’ll probably start new groups.  In others, we might help existing groups to find one another.  I don’t know.  But I do know that something I said earlier in this post is worth saying again – there’s fertile ground here.  Hackers and makers and gamers are really good at learning.

You might already be farming spaces like these – so I’m asking: Where do we go next?

  1. I should not be allowed to use whiteboards without some serious remedial handwriting work. [↩]
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#DML2012 – The Experience of Listening. Was (Too Often) All.

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One of my takeaways from the DML 2012 conference is that the messages of connected learning have not quite caught up yet with the practices of academic conferences.

It’s a common complaint – both that I hear and that I sometimes make – that the learning spaces that we want for children should at least attempt to be modeled by the conferences/meetings where we go to talk about and explore learning possibilities. And while I get that there’s a culture or cultures to academia, and that much of the DML community is rooted in research and dissemination practices that are fairly formal, well, I’m struck that the medium and the messages of the event seemed to be in slight conflict. Even on the mothership, the interesting stuff was still rather on the edge.

Having run conferences and meetups and managed the learning of others’ both grown ups and children, I understand that it is a most difficult undertaking, so I should say right here that I found the DML event nothing short of wicked good. I learned a bunch and will be processing some powerful learning for a while to come. And yet. I’d gently suggest to the organizers of DML 2013 a few small points.

The first being a softball. I’m sure that everyone noticed that the space where the conference was held seemed far smaller than the people of DML. I think the folks there were the right folks – it was a fascinating mix of students and teachers and professors and researchers and makers and geeks.1 But the way the conference was set up – or at least my version of it2 – the sessions were overcrowded and packed into too small rooms and I couldn’t get to many of the things I wanted to see. Even when I could get a seat in a room – and to do so I had to stake out a space early – there were two or three other concurrent sessions I didn’t want to miss.

Here’s the tricky thing. At an event where the messages from the community and presenters and panelists were all about experiencing powerful participatory learning, well, we sure were expected, by design and practice and custom, to sit still and listen a lot. Certainly, we were listening to fascinating stories of promise and practice and learning and teaching and exploration and study and wonder – but we were listeners, and that’s a very particular kind of experience.

I listened to Super Awesome Sylvia talk about making things that mattered. And I really enjoyed hearing from her, particularly when she raised the differences between her learning at home and at school. But might we have made something together?

I listened to Jess Klein explain the potential of a HackJam. I love the tools and mindsets that Mozilla is building in that space. Having experienced a HackJam3, I know they are transformative. They are a Big Deal. Might we have done that together? At least a little bit? Perhaps this happened and I missed it.

I came to one session where a presenter began to read from a paper – the same paper excerpted in the conference program – on the power of media for engaging students. The presenter read from the paper that was provided to me already.

Even in our session on the multiplicity of composition – a session that we intentionally attempted to do differently than a talking head panel – we struggled to make it an active learning experience4. I don’t know if we were struggling against the Internet access in the hotel, or the expectations of the audience, or the limits of our imagination. Or maybe something else.

There’s work to do.

I thought the idea of the Mozilla Science Fair – an hour and a half long reception showcasing many of the institutions and organizations doing important learning work – was a great idea. But an hour or so of crowded tables meant we got short looks into thoughtful work. Those same twenty or so tables should’ve been parceled out over the entire event, with five at a time running engaging events modeling their fascinating and engaging practices. There was a big empty space in the conference area that cried out for us to use it for playing and making and exploring and doing together.5

How can we collectively do a better job of modeling the structures, habits, and aptitudes we want to see of learning and learners, particularly when DML learns together? And what can we do with the listening we’ve done to improve the experiences that are to come? Yeah, I’m saying “we” and “DML,” because, like Chad, I’m willing to say that I am engaged by this group of thoughtful people. I’d feel lucky to be counted as a member of the DML community. I so want them/us to do well.

And there’s room to grow.

  1. That said, I didn’t see lots of IT folk there – but perhaps I wasn’t looking hard enough. Or maybe operations types aren’t the crowd of DML. Oh. That’d be sad if it were true. [↩]
  2. Everyone, you know, has their own conference experience, a collection of what they saw, with whom they spoke, and a variety of other factors. No two people have the same experience, of course. I may well have had the “bad” one. [↩]
  3. That was masterfully facilitated at ISTE 2011 by Chad and Meenoo. [↩]
  4. The writing some of the participants shared during that session, I thought, is worth more of my time. [↩]
  5. The impromptu Occupy Badges session – a spillout of the overcrowded session on Badges – was a good example of what might’ve happened in that space. [↩]
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#DML2012 – On Love and Infrastructure

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I’ve been continually struck at DML with the notions of connectedness and participation.  It makes sense that these would be sticky ideas here, and dominant ones.  The conference opened with the announcement of the Connected Learning Research Network and a talk from John Seely Brown that dealt heavily with notions of participatory culture.

But in our rush to make and play and tinker and connect and engage in learning that matters in institutions that might not, I feel like I’m missing the love.

No, that’s not quite right.  Actually, I’m finding notions of love everywhere I look.  But perhaps that’s because I’m focused on looking for it, and you know how it goes – when you look for something, when you look really hard, you can find it anywhere.

I keep coming back to this interview that Fred Rogers gave to the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.  You should watch the entire series, but here, at 5 minutes and 17 seconds into this particular segment, Mr. Rogers give his definition of teaching and talks about what he was trying to do with his television show:

His words here stick hard with me – I cannot divorce his concept of love and teaching from my way of thinking about teaching now.  And the Internet, or a school, or a community center, or a museum, or any institution of and about learning, can and should provide examples of teachers in love with what they love in front of others as a way of communicating that love, and helping students to find and communicate their own.

And I see resonance with that in the talk of the new DML Connected Learning Research Network, especially in Mimi Ito’s description:

In a nutshell, connected learning is learning that is socially connected, interest-driven, and oriented towards educational and economic opportunity. Connected learning is when you’re pursuing knowledge and expertise around something you care deeply about, and you’re supported by friends and institutions who share and recognize this common passion or purpose.

In talking with her briefly the other night about some mentoring work she’s hoping to do, work to connect passionate mentors to interested learners, I wondered more about issues of scale that have been raised at the conference, about what can scale, and what cannot.

And while I’m not sure that love, itself, can scale, I wonder if finding love maybe can.  Certainly people have limited capacity, and can only love so many so deeply, but computers can help us to find each other.  Networks can help us to find each other.  Institutions can help us to find each other.  Then we can do the human pieces better.

And finding each other, then looking after each other, is well worth doing1.

In this morning’s panel on technical and social innovation, I saw too much emphasis on systems designed around outputs.  I think that’s a large problem in education – we look heavily at what comes out of a system, but not so much on what we put into it.  I’d argue quite strongly, with anyone who’ll listen, that we need to look quite closely and intentionally on what goes into a system, and on what sorts of inputs are privileged in our infrastructures.  And how we inject love and care and compassion and concern into infrastructure is very, very important.  It’s not considered enough, if at all, and these things rarely show up on measures of output.

So how do you build love and care into your systems and infrastructures and learning environments and experiences?  How are you doing so in a way that doesn’t over simplify the complex backgrounds of the people and communities you’re learning from and with?  How are you looking for ways to increase the love and care in your systems?

What are you loving in front of your students and colleagues?  What would they say gets loved in your spaces?

  1. Certainly, too, it’s worth wondering about people who aren’t getting found, or served, or looked after, by institutions of love and learning.  How do we make sure that we focus on entry points so that those who wish to be found can be, and those who don’t want to be found can do that, too.  I’ll say more on entry points, infrastructure and inputs in a future post. [↩]
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#DML2012 – Museums as Experience Places

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I’m sitting right now in a panel session on digital media creation and museums. it’s an interesting look at several institutions’ attempts to bring students into their spaces to create digital media projects. We’ve seen several examples of those projects this morning, and I wanted to get a couple of observations down before they slipped away. In no particular order:

  • There’s a recurring theme here that, if the mission “students should be making things here” is stuck to, other constraints (time, logistics, resources, etc.) can be worked through. Yeah.
  • Bringing in students to make things is a pretty simple idea, but a resonating one. How can we promote more situations like these for students? And, as I’m in a suburban and rural area, I wonder about what spaces beyond big city museums can be places for students to come into to make things with. Where can we send kids out and whom can we invite in to be in making together?
  • Panelists have mentioned that they are not fiddling with the work produced by the students. “We don’t edit the students’ projects,” one panelist said. There’s an interestingness in the idea that students can say things to museums that the museums themselves cannot say, for a variety of institutional and logistical reasons. I’m struck by the reminder of the power of an outsider voice being brought into an institution. This is a two-way thing, of course. And having outside eyes, ears, and voices in your space is a valuable way to see that which you cannot. But it requires an intentional desire to invite in outsiders. I wonder about when our schools and classrooms are inviting outsiders in, and how long they can remain outsiders.
  • I’m struck by how the constraints of design processes and museum practices are useful in design process thinking. But they’re referred to here as opportunities, rather than restrictions. This is a good example of “Yes, and” thinking. I’ll say more about that in my next play post.
  • I’ve been in several sessions so far here at the DML conference, and all of them expect too much listening from the audience. Not enough engagement. This isn’t a dig on this particular session – there’s certainly a culture to this conference and to conferences and institutional dissemination in general – but I’d like to see more doing in sessions like these, particularly as we’re talking about engagement.
  • In the Q & A, it surfaced that the students are asked to write and reflect on their work – blogging, journaling, etc. That’s really important – but it was suggested that they have trouble getting the students to engage in those tasks.1 I asked about how the museum staff working with them are surfacing and modeling their reflective practices. It seems to me that they should be writing with the students. I heard that the Smithsonian is working to digitize many of the journals and logs in their collections – looking forward to seeing those, but that’s not quite what I meant.
  • It’s fascinating to continue to think about how museums are vibrant spaces of learning and making and being together.
  1. Gever Tulley mentioned that students blog at the end of every day at his Tinkering School programs – note to myself to follow up more on that. [↩]
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Play Is Hard Work, Part 1

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In a series of posts, of which this is the first, I’d like to try to write my way through my thinking about play and love and culture and how I’ve been exploring those concepts lately.  In this post, I will attempt to give some background. Future posts in this series will attempt to move from that background into how that thinking, or at least my awareness of it, is coming to life in my work and experiences.  

I had the opportunity to facilitate a workshop at this year’s ITSC event in Portland that feels to me like an important shift in my work.  The session, which I wrote a description of in a hurry several months ago, but knew could be important, was an attempt to capture some of my thinking about the use of play to build culture.  I’m calling it “Play is Hard Work.”  Here’s how I described it when I hastily wrote that description:

Play should be the cornerstone of much of what we do with technology for teaching and learning. Heck, play should comprise a considerable chunk of all of our learning time. But what does play look like in a digital environment? How can we create playful spaces around serious topics? And are play and fun the same things?
In this session, we’ll privilege habits over tools and explore play and playfulness with whatever gadgets, gizmos and whatnots we have in our classrooms.

That description was just about right – but it missed something.  I realized as I was trying to build the session that I didn’t have the language, or the framework, to talk about what I meant by “play” and “playfulness.”

The dictionary helped.  Some.  Many online dictionaries have more than twenty different definitions of play, but this one, from the Definr definition, is most certainly the closest to what I was trying to get at:

 

Play, then, is finding freedom in the face of constraint.  Yes.  That’s getting towards the essence of what I find important in the term1.

Those definitions helped, but they weren’t enough.  I wanted to help folks have some experiences like the ones that we are having every week in our school district IT department – but I also wanted to connect what I saw/see happening in that culture to what I want to see happening in school culture in general.  I’d like folks to be more playful in most areas of their work and not work.  I’d like to play more as a parent, as a teacher, as a person.

And I think other people should be more playful, too.

But I don’t mean that everything is “fun.”  I think assuming that play must be fun is a bad, and likely dangerous, assumption.  I think you can play with really serious ideas and concepts.  I think you can play with hurt, in an attempt to restore community.  And it took months of reading and wondering and asking for me to find the language I needed to structure the workshop – I needed Michelle to hand me a book that has been her go to for a long time on the subject2.  Thankfully, she did.

I needed some of the language of improv.  My friend Zac has been living this language for a while in his teaching and his theater work, but I didn’t see it until I really started to look.

At school, or at least at teacher school, I remember that many folks told me that it was essential to build community in my classroom.  But it was always described in such a way that the idea was that you built it, and then you moved on to whatever it was you really wanted to do with your class – teach them English, or science, or whatever.

I’m more and more certain that you’re never actually done building community.  Community and culture are not just peripheral to teaching and learning – they’re how the teaching and the learning actually happen.  Some call this rhizomatic learning, or connectivism, but whatever you call it, teaching and learning are about building community.  Community of people, of ideas, of experience and activity.  Icky-feeling places, places we’d rather not be, don’t tend to be spaces where much learning happens3.  Maslow comes to mind – we can’t learn until we’re safe.  Playful cultures have to be safe cultures.  And safe cultures can be playful ones.

And the cultures and communities that you build around classroom cultures matter, too.  That’s something that I’ve been learning as a participant observer in my school district’s IT department.  Over the last two years, we’ve been going through a major culture shift, masterfully facilitated by my boss, Joe McBreen.

He came to a place where everyone worked really hard and mostly alone.4  He recognized that we needed to know each other to be better at our work.

Through a process of huddles, short weekly meetings centered on us as people and learners together, and not on our work, and creating learning opportunities for our department to be and to learn together, he began to shape our culture into more than it was, and to create for us a need to do our work together.  We are more playful as a unit, and it’s showing it the work we are doing elsewhere.

That story, and how I tried to create something similar in a room full of strangers, and why that matters, are the subjects of future posts in this series.

  1. Oddly, other definitions contradict that one that I find so essential.  And others still add flavor to the word.  It’s amazing, or troubling, that such a small word has so much baggage. [↩]
  2. You should buy the book.  It’s a quick read – I read it in an hour – but it gave me the language I needed to talk about play and playfulness. [↩]
  3. Of course, I think I’ve known this for a long time, but I’m at a place where I’m seeing implications beyond classrooms, and it’s never a bad idea to try to sketch this stuff out. [↩]
  4. I don’t say this to knock the department as it was – it was good in lots of ways.  There was room to grow, though, which is one reason I went there almost five years ago now. [↩]
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