Communities of Educators as Open Source Innovators

This is the second in a series of articles about creative learning communities, describing early experiments building an open-source design community around the Playing with the Sun project. The previous article is an introduction to the affordances of learning communities.

When four Danish libraries asked for help building Playing with the Sun construction kits earlier this year, my colleagues at Aarhus Public Libraries and I made plans for all of us to spend the day in Dokk1 Library's Makerspace. At our first ever “Build Party,” we spoke about pedagogy, demonstrated how each element of the construction kit is made, and built construction kits (and learned how to build construction kits) alongside one another.  

As I was describing how to assemble the latest version of the solar panel, I mentioned that I was struggling with securing the yellow XT30 connector onto the solar panel’s laser cut wooden back plate. I’d settled on some nasty smelling glue, but I didn’t feel confident it would stand up to the hands of children.

A librarian from Vejle called Jørgen asked if I’d considered using zip ties to anchor the connector. I hadn’t. We decided to try it, and it quickly became clear that zip ties are a much better solution than epoxy. Soon afterwards, I updated the instructions on the Playing with the Sun resources website so that anyone building the kit can benefit from Jørgen’s idea, as well as every other good idea that gets folded into the construction kit as it evolves.

Open Source & Creative Learning Communities

Most of the software that runs the internet is made by open source communities that work in a similar way. The "open" in open source means that everyone is free to read, copy, modify, and improve it.  This is done by submitting a “pull request” - a set of changes to the code that integrates the new feature or fix into the software. The maintainers of the software can choose to accept, refine, or reject these changes, and explain their thinking  in comments. This creates a virtuous circle in which contributors make improvements and get feedback on their work as they learn more about the project. Eventually, some of these contributors will become maintainers themselves.

As they say about Wikipedia, this decentralized approach to building software "works only in practice, not in theory."

As amazing as it is that these open-source learning communities can create incredibly complex software - even the Linux operating system – it’s far from a perfect model. Many open source projects struggle for funding and contributors and risk burning out overworked maintainers, who very often volunteer their time. Nonetheless, their existence demonstrates that decentralized learning communities can collectively create, maintain, and continue to evolve extremely complex technologies.

Can the open-source model work for Educators and Educational Technology?

In the example above, the librarian educator's zip-tie engineering solution gets folded into the open source project, similar to the way pull requests work with open-source software. But what about the educational and aesthetic elements of the project? 

Matilda joined the Playing with the Sun project at Aarhus Public Libraries with a background as a science educator. She had an interest in playful learning and years of experience working with kids on STEM learning. As part of her introduction to Tinkering, I invited her and the rest of the group to try a variation on a classic tinkering activity called art machines. Afterwards I showed them a remix of art machines I was working on for Playing with the Sun in which the drawing machines used solar panels instead of batteries. 

As we were exploring different building materials to use in the early stages of our construction kit, Matilda gave feedback on the “feel” of various elements. She often pointed out how her aesthetic experience of the materials influenced her desire to explore and build with them.

One day Matilda had the idea that the drawing machines activity could use something other than ink pens to draw. She had used food safe dyes to make colored sand for an earlier project, so she began to experiment with how the machines might make marks in the sand. The results were aesthetically interesting.

When Matilda showed the rest of the design team this video of her experiments with sand we were excited to try it for ourselves. We noticed that it was aesthetically engaging visually, but also to our felt sense of texture. As with all drawing machine activities, the marks they make form a record of movement across time that gives rise to interesting questions. For example, why do some patterns repeat while others produce seemingly random variation?

A few weeks later we ran a drop-in workshop for children at an environmental conference at Dokk1 Library, to see what learners made when we invited them to try our sand drawing machines. It was a hit. We observed a great deal of engagement and several creative experiments we hadn't imagined were possible. Here's a video of a contraption that draws outlines of the sun in the sand, made by a girl of about 10 years.

Today Matilda's idea of making patterns in colored sand is part of the teaching resources the project offers to all educators, visible on the pattern machines activity page of the Playing with the Sun resources site. As I pointed out in the previous article on creative learning communities, being part of a learning community is never just about learning. For Matilda, the experience was valuable in many different ways.

"I experienced an acceptance of my ideas and room for playing on my own terms, and in a way that constantly engaged my genuine curiosity related to topics that I find interesting. This made the workshops come alive in a way that felt almost like playing, co-writing, and listening to music.”

What's the big idea behind working with teachers in ways that invite curiosity, exploration, and joy? Engaging with a teacher's curiosity and enthusiasm is the best way to help them learn to engage with the student's curiosity and enthusiasm. If we want teachers to be able to support this kind of creative work with learners, we need to create opportunities for them to be creative and playful themselves. Inviting them to be part of a learning community developing open source creative learning experiences is one way to do this.

Using zip ties and colored sand aren't earth-shattering breakthroughs. But they are evidence that a creative learning community made up of diverse educators can develop activities and technologies in ways that can be shared and built upon by future contributors. This is similar to how the Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium does learning activity design collectively, even with teams of educators working thousands of miles apart. And it resembles the process behind the development of the Reggio Emilia Approach, as well as the design of Scratch and other creative technologies that emerged out of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT Media Lab.

The emphasis here isn’t so much on the quality of the end product as it is on the learning potential of being part of the process. In this role the educator is less a technician - delivering content and ideas invented and organized by others - and more like a design researcher, part of a team helping children learn to do project-based design research themselves.  Why do it in this open-ended way, when it’s clearly dependent on the people in the room, many of whom aren't even experts with technology? Because being told about a fact or solution someone else discovered is different from being part of a design research process aimed at inventing something new.

In spite of over a century of diligent effort by progressive educators, too much of time spent in schools today is aimed at making students absorb what someone else has already discovered, a type of learning Paulo Freire referred to as the "banking model of education." But if we want people to learn how to produce new knowledge and insights, we need to put them in situations where they can do the work of discovery and experimentation first hand, and not just figure out the answers to questions we already have the answers to.

What's needed is a nesting of feedback loops: The educator's activity design work is informed by the children's work with the activity, which also informs the work of the construction kit design team. The goal here is to pilot a creative learning community to support both innovation and professional development for educators as they develop new ways to support learner-driven exploration for the learners. All of these elements can be part of the same integrated process.

Creative learning communities in the age of rapid climate change

The relationship between consumers and producers that characterizes late capitalism is unlikely to continue without interruption as climate change progresses. The people we've collectively given our power to have advanced us too far into the climate crisis, and done too little to prevent its worst effects. As a result it’s becoming increasingly likely that we will experience supply chain disruptions and shortages in the coming years, especially as a culture of incompetence and corruption will soon hold the reins of the still dominant superpower, further destabilizing the existing world order.

Although it probably never made sense environmentally, today it makes economic sense to design a smartphone in San Francisco, have it produced in China, and then distribute it around the world. But this requires a late 20th, early 21st century world made "smaller" by an abundance of cheap fossil fuels. That age is coming to an end. We should prepare ourselves for the ever-shrinking "small" world we've known all our lives to start getting bigger again.

As the climate crisis deepens, each local community will need to figure out how to solve their own local problems, as they've had to throughout most of human history. Ideas can still be shared freely around the globe. But the ability to situate and adapt them to one's local context will remain a precious local resource. Instead of looking for solutions designed in the US and manufactured in China, each community will have to depend on its local design and engineering expertise, the foundation of its technological resilience. Educators (and librarian educators), as well as Makers of all kinds, can play an important role in these decentralized learning communities as they emerge to tackle new challenges.  

If we want to build local expertise, we need to recognize that simply purchasing a piece of technology designed and manufactured far away leaves the processes behind its creation invisible, both to educators and the learners they work with. Whereas participating in a learning community that maintains and evolves a technology (as well as the practices built around it) makes these processes visible - something one can ask questions about, experiment with, and even contribute new ideas to. Naturally, products made by these communities will be rougher and less polished than they would be if they were designed by professionals with big budgets. But if the learning associated with the design process is more important than the product, then accepting products that are rough around the edges is a reasonable compromise to make. 

To understand the pedagogical implications, we can imagine a first encounter with a new technology through the eyes of a child. In the most common scenario today, the teacher introduces something made far away by people no one in the room has ever met or will likely encounter during their lifetime. It might as well be a magical talisman. In the case of the Playing with the Sun construction kit, the child holds something in their hand made with parts that their teacher 3D printed and laser cut in their own Makerspace. As a participant in Playing with the Sun, that teacher meets with the design team periodically, so they know how to get in touch if they want to ask a question or pitch a new idea one of their students came up with. The project is designed to support loose interconnections between all the different participants, an example of what Steven Johnson called "Liquid Networks." Although the students, educators, and designers each have different roles to play, they all play a part in the same creative learning community.