Charlie’s IDP Final Project Journey

This project journey keeps track of the thinking around the final project and offers my mentors, and various interested parties, updated. Scroll to the bottom of this entry to see the changelog.

Friday September 9th, 2016, marked the beginning of our final projects at this year’s Interaction Design Program at CIID. This journey is an always up-to-date summary of my progress and thinking.

Final project goals

I want my final project to show me how to explore problems that are systemic, and help me create a methodology for dealing with philosophical challenges in design problems. In these 6 weeks of exploration, I hope to really develop a process that feels right, agile, and holistic not only for myself, but also one that I can pass on to future project teams and jobs.

Interests

As someone that’s interested in groups of people and educations, I’m looking to explore the possibility of alternatives to the traditional academic model. The definition of “education” will be learning in general, whether in school or outside of it. By understanding these group dynamics and how people learn, I hope to create a project that will empower humans to expand their curiosity but also challenge them to new ideas they may not have thought of.

Schools are places that are filled with groups, and groups are extremely rich sources of inspiration and information. This is why I am currently thinking about designing for education in context of a school, but as the project evolves I am willing to see it branch off.

Relevance

Humans are born learners. We learn to understand the world around us. However, this is typical of any animal and in that sense, we are not at all special. What is special about us is the ability to abstract, imagine, and most importantly, pass down the education from one generation to the next.

Initially, the first schools had noble causes of helping people learn and understand in ways that were explorative and filled with questions. At the turn of the industrial revolution, the word “education” changed forever to mean “academic”, and more specifically, we made schools production lines for workers who do not need critical thinking and imagination.

This project will aim to challenge these notions by empowering individuals to understand themselves and how they learn, but also to facilitate the act of learning and community building.

Challenges

Areas I’m comfortable

• Communications
• Critical thinking
• Visual design
• Parsing and synthesizing difficult information
• Asking difficult questions

Areas I’m not comfortable

• Programming
• Developing relevant research tools
• Implementation paralysis — overthinking the problems for a solution

Related projects

• Khan Academy: Because it’s a decentralized and free bank of all the knowledge relevant for a ‘General Education’ level
• Mozilla OpenBadges: Because they are decentralized but standardized stamps of approval
• Wikisuite: Because it’s an open-source community management platform
• ALT School: For using technology to build personalized education for each student, as well as focusing on project-based learning, and community engagement.
• Edutopia: For providing a platform for people to discuss educational reform
• Fresh Grade: Because it’s challenging the idea of how homework is done and checked.
• As well as a plethora of fantastic alternative school initiatives. List coming soon.

Starting point

From my teenage years, I’ve been burned by the particular education I got for preventing me from studying what I enjoyed and not giving me the time to explore freely outside of the curriculum. A few legendary moments with a select group of teachers and administrators saved me from myself when they approached me and told me that I can be what I want but the ugly work has to be done first.

It clicked in my head eventually, despite the fact that it was already the last semester of my second to last year in high school, and I became extremely engaged in the community of the institution. This continued, with great benefit to my life (though not my grades), in university.

This led me to three key realizations. First, the ability to connect immediately with a caring mentor can forever change a “rogue” student’s path. Second, delivered in a correct and sufficiently relevant way, most subjects can become interesting to a pupil. Third, the community and one’s involvement in it is as important, if not more in some cases, as the actual time spent reading and crunching numbers in class.

These realizations came full circle after I started reading the writings of important pedagogues, and have manifested themselves into a crosshairs directly aimed at highly standardized schools. I want to help children that feel alone — or rather trapped — by their school, parents who feel helpless about the lack of options for school, and disenchanted teachers that know how to help their students but don’t have the means.

Explorations

Considering my own experience with education, I taught myself more than I can imagine with nothing more than a computer and an internet connection.

From searches online today about educational technology, too much of it is focused on toys and apps, particularly geared towards children aged 1–13. The thing about these children is that, for the most part, they can learn through play with anything from a twig and a bit of dirt, to a microchip connected to a screen and keyboard — but are we creating the environment for it and what does that environment look like?

I started doing some readings on motivation and alternative education, I met with some teachers, spoke to students, and visited alternative schools here in Copenhagen, and I contacted experts in educational systems, both organizational and technological.

At first, I started thinking that there must be a way to create a scalable solution for individualized learning curriculums. Naturally, I started looking at technology and found myself staring down the barrel of deep learning artificial neural networks gun. This started developing itself into a crazy operating system that aimed to be a silver bullet in customization, contingent on the fact that this technology will one day be both that smart and that conscientious. Think HAL 9000 for school minus the glowing evil eye. As a counter-measure, I thought of another system where everything — including exam questions, was open-source. Romantic as that sounded to me, the reality is that not all people are participatory at a high enough level for that to work. I submitted these to a project by critical pedagogue Ted Hunt, and they got approved and posted on the site — and the central ethos behind both of them is still influencing the way I think about education currently.

Then came the visit to Bjørn’s International School, where kids roam free and teachers give them adequate attention, individualized material, and where the kids are allowed to fail long enough without an adult that another classmate will come to their rescue. This immediately sent me down a spiral of confusion. It’s a system that works beautifully, the only thing we need to do is work with the governments and school boards in the public sector in places where it’s completely run by standards and entrance exams like North America and the Middle East. Technology in this case wasn’t the answer. Or maybe it was! Let’s use the technology of the School OS I was thinking of to scale the experience of that classroom to the whole world! This time, however, humans from the community surrounding the school will help manage the OS in conjunction with its own algorithmic analysis.

I presented this to a former professor of mine, who’s an ethnographer and technopedagogue. From our discussion, I realized that most of the components of the OS that I was thinking of already existed in some measure as disjointed parts. Not only that, but attempts to combine them in meaningful ways have been done previously but due to regulations and ethical conundrums of data management, they’ve fallen apart. The thing that was really increasing in popularity, is the idea of a decentralized education. More and more, free and open resources are emerging on the web and in grassroots movements offline to help people continue learning and exploring outside an official educational environment.

This got me thinking, how can we take advantage of all these beautiful initiatives in a way that’s less individualistic?

Design challenge

From this hill of information, bordering on mountain of overload, I’m looking to try and understand if there’s any real way of decentralizing education so that we can empower any community to develop their own system.

I believe that in the beautiful parts of the internet, there exists all the resources for someone to educate themselves, or even to educate someone else.

Going forward, I’m looking to talk to students, parents, teachers and ed-tech systems experts to see what they think the role of the community around them is in education, as well as what they believe the role of technology is in learning. This will be used to understand and consequently build a tool that can help with the design of educational environments.

The vision is to create a system that can evolve and learn from itself, but also try and predict where it needs to go going forward — be it using the fanciest silicon tech in the world or the collective knowledge of a society.

I want to use already existing open-systems for as long as it feasible to help the project, and combine this year’s learnings about how to be inclusive when designing systems and where to be best implement tech.

Changelog

[1.0] — 2016–09–22

Added

• Design challenge

Updated

• Starting point: Now delivered as a story of motivation for the inspiration
• Explorations: Now includes important literature, observations, and ideas from pedagogues
• Related projects: Added 3/Removed 1
• Overall: Changed titles to better reflect the sections. Updated changelog to contain the explicit section names, thus nullifying the dictionary

[0.6] — 2016–09–16

Updated

• Related projects: Added 2

[0.5] — 2016–09–12

Added

• Starting point
• Explorations

[0.1] — 2016–09–09

Added

• Final project goal
• Interests
• Relevance
• Challenges
• Related projects