Playpen

I presented my seminar on Creative Collaboration and The Future of Education at Urban Learning Space yesterday and very much enjoyed the Glaswegian hospitality of all the folks at ULS.

Although it would have been nice if I had managed to leave a little more time for discussion, I was really encouraged by many of the responses and questions afterwards. I gave me a sense that there are plenty of like minds out there wanting to try make some real changes in the system and philosophy of education that align better with the creative/knowledge economy and the Play Ethic.

Ewan McIntosh, in an amazing feat of very fast typing and live blogging, has some thoughts on the first part of the talk here, in which I went through Omnium’s projects and Creative Waves 2007 in particular. He also added some great links and thoughts about the second, Future of Education, part in a separate post.

The slime mould you can see above is a metaphor I used for lots of small trends that are developing in parallel suddenly connecting up and coagulating into what appears to be a complete, coherent organism (which is essentially what ‘Web 2.0′ is a case of).

It can happen suddenly and there is the potential for this to happen in education and completely upend things. I think the likelihood is probably that it won’t be as upended as it could be because of the established mechanisms for controlling that status quo. (I also talked about outlying villages and towns coagulating into suburbs and finally being absorbed into major cities as a similar, slower, example).

However, the change will happen in any case and the real challenge is to be asking the right questions far enough in advance to work out how to deal with these rapid changes. At present I haven’t seen much evidence of this from within institutions themselves.

Incidentally, I owe the use of the slime mould metaphor to Steven Johnson and his excellent book Emergence.

ULS will be putting up a podcast and the presentation material on their website soon, I’ll post a link when it’s up.

UPDATE: It’s not on the website yet but you can find the podcast by subscribing to ULS’s iTunes feed.

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I’m going to be giving a seminar called Creative Collaboration and the Future of Education at Urban Learning Space in Glasgow who have a number of really interesting projects concerning future ways of working, playing, thinking and learning.

I’ll be presenting the Creative Waves 2007 - VIP project in detail, talking about the using a design process and creative collaboration for cross-disciplinary projects as well as a look at the issues facing the future of education. Much of which I have developed since writing about these issues a while back. I’m planning a bit of a brainstorming session with the attendees too. There will hopefully be a podcast and a download of the presentation on the ULS website afterwards.

It would be great to catch up with any of you there and if you want to get in touch before hand, please do.

Details are: 30 August 2007, 10am – 12.30pm. It’s free, but you need to contact Yvonne Kincaid to register.

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A year or so ago I heard about plans to set up the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) and I’m really happy to see that they are now ready to launch their pilot year for 2008. Many of the people involved are ex-Ivrea and I notice that Live|Work’s Lavrans Løvlie and Frog Design’s Fabio Sergio are amongst the invited faculty, so there should be some great talent around the students.

The real trick is to build a structure that allows for the very best teaching and learning experiences. But as many of them have a background in service design they should be able to apply those skills to their own institution (but it’s always hard to be your own client).

Apart from the obvious interaction design connection, I’m interested in the way they might have set up the courses and their process there. Given many of my writings on education I have often wondered “what would I do if I were to start an institution from scratch?”.

It’s not a trivial task and most probably pretty scary to be doing. It was nice to stumble across this comment at the bottom of the CIID page:

This is an experiment – we’re diving in head-first and hope you will too. There’s a chance it might not happen, but we’re willing to take the risk and we’re looking for those daring enough to join us.

Something you would never see on any dull established university’s pages, yet the truth is all of them are hanging onto dear life in a whirlpool of change. The founders of CIID are at least happy about it and willing to be transparent.

I wish them the very best of luck.

p.s. They’re only looking for 15-20 students (the luxury!) in this pilot stage, so if you are interested head to the admissions page. Applications close at the end of August this year.

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I’m very chuffed to see that ChangeThis selected my thoughts on education to be part of their manifesto the Dramtic Impact of “The Silent Revolution”. ChangeThis asked readers to comment upon Elizabeth Haas Edelsheim’s earlier manifesto on the continuing influence of Peter Drucker on business.

I chose to talk about a radically different future for education.

The rest of the manifesto (not just my part!) makes for an interesting read – you can download the Dramtic Impact of “The Silent Revolution” from ChangeThis directly.

If you like it, please pass it on.

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There’s an interesting interview with Zach Lieberman by Karl Willis on the Window.nz website. Lieberman talks about his work on the Open Frameworks project, which is basically a set of C++ libraries specifically set up for creative work. I haven’t used it, but I imagine it’s a kind of supercharged Processing as it’s running in C++.

One point that I thought was worth pulling out, given the tension between research and arts practice that often exists in universities, was this:

One thing I was interested in, I always try to do this when I’m teaching, is to really preach this idea that artistic practice is research. That really art-making is research in the same way that, science, you know, a physicist is doing research. So I like this idea, when you think about research, research is really built on the work of other people.

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I found Richard Sarson’s piece, The Kids Are Alright Online, over at the Guardian interesting today. He interviews children about their internet usage and the role technology plays in their lives. It has a lot to do with the issues we discuss in the Omnium Project, so I’ve blogged about it there instead of double-posting here if you want to take a look.

One thing caught my eye, though, that I’ll repeat here:

Broadly, Josh, Anna and James all use similar sites and programs in similar ways: their favourite sites are MySpace, Bebo, MSN, YouTube, the iTunes Store and they play World of Warcraft. Why one rather than another? Because “their friends are on there already”; loyalty can shift en masse. They do like sites to be easy to use. Josh prefers Bebo because he finds MySpace “fiddly”.

Not only do I, too, find MySpace an absolute interface design hell, but the notion that loyalty can shift en masse is really crucial to anyone working in this area. It shows how quickly your humming community can become a ghost town. It’s worth reading Mike’s links on the Network Effect for why it’s so crucial to look after everyone in your community or customer base.

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I added the link to Michael Schmitz’s Human Computer interaction in Science Fiction Movies to my del.icio.us account a while ago when one of my students showed me the link. I then forgot to blog it.

It’s a pretty interesting account of the interaction (sorry..) between sci-fi and what actually exists or is invented as a result. But the best thing about the essay is that it digs up some really rubbish ideas and some films I had totally forgotten about too.

Johnny Mnemonic is one such criminal. Take a look at Keanu at work here:

But one other thing caught my eye - Schmitz goes right back to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and reminds us of the sort of ‘clock’ interface that has lights around it.

The worker has to move the hands to the lights when they light up all day. That’s all he does. Doesn’t it remind you of responding to all those e-mails, IMs and SMS messages all day?

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