Innovation: Play, Passion and Purpose and the Problem with Standards

Today I pulled out some paint, gel medium, gesso, photographs, altered pages from a notebook, and batik paper I had previously made and began to play.  I wasn't sure what I wanted to compose but I did know that I wanted to make use of materials that were new and ones I had previously made. Hours went by and so involved was I that I paid the clock little notice. As I worked a sense of purpose emerged.

Hung the Moon (M.A. Reilly, Mixed Media, 2012)

While I worked, my son two floors above built a replica of the Soviet Typhoon-Class submarine, a few destroyers and battleships in Minecraft that then used them in the course of playing on the server with others.  Like me, he too worked and played and hours passed. We each were fueled by passion and a sense of play, and out of these--purpose emerged.

Screenshot 1(DC, 2012)

Screenshot 2 (DC, 2012)

No one dictated what we should or should not do and this got me thinking about the importance of play, making, and agency--and how these reveal and help to define purpose.  Tony Wagner (2012) in Creating Innovators writes about the relationship among play, passion and purpose. He notes:

In the lives of young innovators whom I interviewed, I discovered a consistent link and developmental arc in their progression from play to passion to purpose. These young people played a great deal—but their play was frequently far less structured than most children’s, and they had opportunities to explore, experiment, and discover through trial and error—to take risks and to fall down. Through this kind of more creative play as children, these young innovators discovered a passion—often as young adolescents. As they pursued their passions, though, their interests changed and took surprising turns. They developed new passions, which, over time, evolved into a deeper and more mature sense of purpose—a kind of shared adult play (p. 30).

I appreciate the idea of the links among play, passion, and purpose--although I would imagine the links are less developmental and more iterative and recursive. Nonetheless that they are co-specifying feels important. Also the need to solve problems seems inherent in all three.

Both my son and I ran into design problems as we played that we each addressed by recalling past work (such as photographing, making things from Legos), leaving the work for a bit of time and returning to it, changing perspective, and trial and error. Creating as we each did today required a large block of time, permission to spend that time as we each wished, and tools necessary to get the work accomplished. It also required not knowing the end when we each started and in fact, not really having a start that was formal.  Rather, the beginning was well over from the point when we might have been able to name it as such. There is an ambiguity here that is rather critical.

All of these ways of composing, coming to know and producing that my son and I each employed are somewhat antithetical to traditional U.S. schooling, especially with its emphasis on external standards. External standards presupposes a neat world--one in which knowledge is defined and the transfer of the defined knowledge is often an end goal. Is it any wonder that so many find school a dead end? My son's interest in the Soviet Union grew out of play, not history class. My interest in textures, mixed media, and photography has grown out of play as well.

On Saturdays like today, I wonder a lot about the spaces of permission necessary for creating to happen and how schools might become such places.


Work Cited




Wagner, Tony (2012-04-17). Creating Innovators. Scribner. Kindle Edition.

Affinity Spaces, Collisions, and King's Dream

A Time to Break the Silence (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

 I.

It catches me by surprise when my son tells me that the age range on his Minecraft server is 7 to 73.  Eight decades. Wow, what a range of experience, a collection of perspectives, a sounding of life stories.

As a mom, I have an ear to that server and am marveling at what I am coming to understand: connected play allows for the development of ideas--'people collisions' so to speak--that have the potential to generate new ideas, open perspectives, allow for reconsideration. These collisions are inherently nomadic: just where individual ideas begin to morph into new epiphanies is difficult to trace--if at all. Now for sure, there have always been groups and ideas that have rubbed up against one another--neighborly interactions. What's different in this connected world of affinity spaces is the juxtaposition of people who previously would not have had the occasion to notice one another, let alone form important relationships.  On my son's server there is:

• A 73-year-old Minecraft player from Canada.  
• A Sultan, a 20-something Saudi prince.
• A 9-year old beginning coder from Pennsylvania.
• A 'with it' girl coder from just outside London.
• A veritable ABCs of teens and more teens from Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, Denmark, Egypt, France...Russia...US and so on...
• A teacher from Jersey.

Oh to be fly on that wall when this group starts chatting. Who can begin to name the possibilities that open as these players mix, collide? When I think about all those collisions, I get hopeful and I think maybe, just maybe King's dream might become reality.

II.

The first time I recall seeing my dad cry was the day Dr.  King was murdered.  I was a child then and the image of my 6' 2" father bowed by sadness remains decades later.  Dr. King had a dream that we still might get right.   He said:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Might our children become less influenced by racism as they interact with others from around the globe and from across geographic areas that are separated by income, gender, belief?  Might they code difference differently when they experience others on a daily basis?  Might affinity spaces, such as a Minecraft server, produce occasions for becoming (other)wise?

III.

We're in the car--the site of so much conversation--when my son tells me that he has changed the economic system he is using on his server from capitalism to communism.  I am uncertain as to what he means by this but do listen as he tells me that capitalism is so yesterday and it just seems to work out so much better when people have what they need.

Who decides what is needed? I ask.

You only have to say.   It's smoother that way, he says.

You only have to say. Hmm.


IV.

How different is our perspective when the world is understood as being abundant, enough? Might thinking make it so?

Digital Identities as Composition: Thinking about School

I. Composing Digitally

It's late evening when my son asks me to listen to something on his iPad.  The something turns into six different versions of the Elder Scrolls v. Skyrim. He shows me the different versions commenting on what he likes about each and how each is different.  His comments are specific and he speaks with confidence about the use of vocals in one version, the beauty of string violins in another, the simplicity of the piano version and tells me that another is more Baroque in style and that he thinks of himself as being a bit Baroque.  He then shows me a synthesia version explaining that the colors have tonal quality and how this helped him to compose Skyrim in Minecraft.

"I could see the music as colors."

Last week, he played his version of Skyrim in Minecraft for his dad and me.  He had composed the song using note blocks (singles and doubles) powered by redstone circuits and is now editing a screencast of him playing the song. This is a complicated process as the note blocks are visually spaced to represent the time signature: the distance between blocks is equal to each note's duration. Each note block represents a sound and can be layered to represent multiple notes played simultaneously.

Hartmann's Hut of Baba Yaga

He next played the Promenade from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and told me that he planned to compose this as well in Minecraft and do so for me for Mother's Day.  He located a synthesia version and played it and explained that this would help him to compose. Delighted, I thought how the mother's day card evolves. 

II. Composing At School

My son is not a musician by the standard measure. He does not take music lessons although he did for a year (trumpet). He does not play in the school band. He does not have music this year at school.  He hears really well though and he knows how to teach himself by watching related YouTube videos, reading Minecraft wikis, and asking for help from those with whom he interacts with online on his server and in other gaming environments.  He also knows the power of pull (Hagel III, Brown & Davison, 2010).

Hagel III, Brown & Davison explain three levels of pull:

"At the most basic level, pull helps us to find and access people and resources when we need them. At a second level, pull is the ability to attract people and resources to you that are relevant and valuable, even if you were not even aware before that they existed. Think here of serendipity rather than search. Finally, in a world of mounting pressure and unforeseen opportunities, we need to cultivate a third level of pull—the ability to pull from within ourselves the insight and performance required to more effectively achieve our potential. We can use pull to learn faster and translate that learning into rapidly improving performance, not just for ourselves, but for the people we connect with—a virtuous cycle that we can participate in" (pp. 9-10).

How is 'pull' being allowed and leveraged at school?  How are we altering school definitions of composing to include aspects of pulling (access, attraction, and achievement) and digital work?   How are we investigating the cognitive and social processes our children are using when they compose these digital works inside gaming worlds, as screencasts, as code, as how-to videos, as art works, as photographic works, as remixes? How do we understand the back story that informs the work?   How are we reconciling the 19th century school with digital learners who show up at the school door having composed multiple digital identities? How are we addressing immense equity issues for our learners who cannot show up at the school door having accessed significant hours of online leaning?

III. Composing Identities

We are always composing versions of ourselves.  Research by Sénéchal and LeFevre (2002) indicates that home literacy experiences contribute substantially to children’s success in learning to read.  These home literacy experiences are formed by the frequency and quality of talk between children and parents and the consistent engagement with literacy habits that are privileged (playing word and song games; singing; reading to children; having books, magazines, newspapers, e-readers, computers in use in the home; having available and in use different types of writing materials; listening to nursery rhymes and so on) in the home and at school.  These experiences form identities that inform how children function at school and how they are recognized by teachers.  These children show up at the school door speaking and acting with the school Discourse quite in hand.

The home literacy practices that Sénéchal and LeFevre discussed in 2002 were quite comfortable for our school worlds as they mimicked literacy values of the school.  As literacies are fluid and changing, the way we understand them at school must also continue to evolve.  And this is a conundrum worth thinking about.  There is an increasing gulf between what we value at school as learning and what the connected child experiences as valued learning outside of school.  Likewise there is a troubling gulf between the child who is connected and the one who is not.  The play and work inside digital networks (in)forms and is (in)formed by our emerging sense of identity.  To what end are we considering digital identities as compositions worthy of teaching at school?

Bon Stewart (@bonstewart) has a terrific post about digital identities, "Digital Identities: Six Key Selves of  Networked Publics" that I would recommend reading.  She outlines six key selves that emerge via participation in networked publics (Note: all quotes are taken from the Stewart's blog post):

1. The Performative, Public Self: "The networked self is linked in multiple, complex, individual node-to-node relationships with others as part of an ever-shifting public."
2. The Quantified – or Articulated – Self: "...our network contacts are visible and articulated, and our actions and contributions are quantified."
3. The Participatory Self: "within my networks I am both a creator of my own content but also a consumer of that which my peers produce and share. My relationships are groomed by the constant iterative work of participation, and my comfort with working in isolation towards a final product – as was the paper model of creative work – recedes in the rear-view mirror."
4. The Asynchronous Self: "Digital sociality practices and networked publics moved increasingly towards asynchronous mediated communications, rather than the interruptive, immediate demands of telephones."
5. The PolySocial – or Augmented Reality – Self:"...digital identities not as virtual selves, but as particular subjects brought into being by our relational, mobile interactions in the world of bits and extending into the world of atoms."
6. The Neo-Liberal, Branded Self: "Our social networking platforms are increasingly neo-liberal “Me, Inc” spaces where we are exhorted to monetize and to 'find our niche.'"

In thinking about Stewart's six key selves (also acts of composing and being composed, yes?), I wonder what are we doing locally, nationally and globally to guide children who are connected to understand the selves they compose and are composed by?  What are we doing locally, nationally and globally to address the enormous equity issues most felt by children who are not connected? I want to urge that we resist categorizing composing as simply a matter of ink to paper as is most commonly done at school.  This is simply no longer a sufficient definition.  I am not devaluing ink to paper, but do want us to consider that composing is much, much larger and via the Internet, the social aspects of composition along with the modes of composition become increasingly important, dynamic, risky, confusing, and collaborative.  The selves Stewart outlines is not limited to adults. Our children who participate in networked publics are composing and being composed. Should this not be essential school-based literacies as well?

So let me close with a challenge: Take a walk around the school where you work.  Notice how composing is being defined by the work children produce and the work that is displayed.  I tend to do these walks with my phone in hand. A picture says so much, yes?

I'd love to hear about what you find...


Works Cited:

Brown, John Seely; Davison, Lang; Hagel III, John (2010-02-23). The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion. Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.
Sénéchal, M., & LeFevre, J. (2002). Parental involvement in the development of children's reading
skill: A five-year longitudinal study. Child Development, 73, 445–460.

Being 12 & Being Literate: Looking at Boys' Out-of-School Multimodal Texts and Game Play

From Redstone Tutorial, Part 3: TNT Canons

Before the printing press existed, those training for scholarly roles wrote down word for word what a master or teacher read from his text. This text, of course, was most importantly the Bible; and one might suggest from an anthropological perspective that this may explain the inherent belief among those of the SAE world view the validity of the printed page regardless of what one's senses may tell one. An individual's own experience becomes secondary to what the accepted point of view may be, which is of course, precisely what the "Book" says.    - Terry Tafoya. (1989). Coyote's Eyes: Native Cognition Styles. Journal of American Indian Education.

Copying isn't composing. Much of what I see my son doing at middle school resembles the pre-printing press times.  For example he recently had to access a teacher's notes from an online site and copy these into his physical (paper) notebook.  In this post I want to take a look at the important literacies that young boys are participating in that are done outside of school.

As many of you know, I have been taking an extended look at my 12-year-old son and several of his friend's Minecraft play this last year. In part, I have been trying to understand the boys' literate behaviors that emerge during their game playing and making multimodal texts, such as: screencasts, livestreams, and videos.  By observing the artifacts the boys compose, I have begun to note some similarities and important differences between adolescents' literacies developed during play, and those privileged via school-based essayist assignments*.

Additionally of interest to me are the literacies these young boys engage in, specifically I am wondering about how they:

• connect with others across the globe through Skype and multiplayer game sites
• collaborate to build/rebuild/remix, maintain, and refine fictional worlds; make and upload multimodal texts to the Internet; write code; develop and maintain a Minecraft server; attract, support, and ban server clients; and develop and enact a business plan
• compose written code and multimodal texts (such as: screencasts, trailers, livestreams, videos)
• contextualize environments in which play occurs 
• participate in on-line play

This post represents some tentative thoughts and I welcome your insights. 

Screencasts, Essayist Prose and the Problem of Authorship and Audience

One important difference between the literacies these adolescents develop as a result of out-of-school play and essayist prose style privileged inside school relates to the authenticity of author and audience.  In thinking about essayist authorship and audience,  James Gee (1990) writes:

A further significant aspect of essayist prose style is the fictionalization of both the audience and the author. The 'reader' of an essayist text is not an ordinary human being but an idealization, a rational mind formed by the rational body of knowledge of which the essay is a part. By the same token the author is a fiction, since the process of writing and editing essayist texts leads to an effacement of individual and idiosyncratic identity (pp. 60-61).

In contrast to essayist prose, the mulitmodal texts developed by the boys are imbued with voice (often literally) and they are created with specific audiences in mind.  For example, when I ask my son who he imagines the audience to be when he makes a Minecraft screencast, he says that the viewers will likely be gamers interested in the specific topic, but who don't know how to do what he is explaining. The author, like the audience are ordinary and may well become participatory in some aspect of the play. Many of the texts the boys compose are how-to screencasts related to games.  To give a sense of audience, one of the boys, James (pseudonym) routinely has between 5,000 and 15,000 viewers for each of his 300+ video uploads on YouTube.  This represents a sizable audience.

In the comments section of one video, a viewer wrote:

dude this lets play is gold i watched this and bought mysims agents/thanks to you man/i like these lets plays very cool! 

James responded, "Never thought that I would influence someone/thats great and am glad you like it so much."

There are significant philosophical differences between essayist prose and the literacies the boys compose.  When "literacy" is understood as being a transferable commodity not influenced by any social context and considered an independent variable, an autonomous model of literacy (Street, 1984) is being embraced.  An autonomous model of literacy is based on the belief that any student learns skill x and who the learner is, is not, the context of where the learning is occurring and when is meaningless.  The skill is understood as being independent from actual human context. Stripped of gendered, social, racial, historical, technological, and economic overtones--literacy learning exists as a cognitive task to be mastered.

In contrast to an autonomous model, a group of theorist, the New London Group**, published an influential paper, A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures in the Harvard Educational Review (1996) that asked us to understand that "literacy" learning is multi-dimensional and socially situated.  Skills do no exist outside of a given context and how we learn and even come to name something as a "literacy skill" is culturally determined and bound.  Literacies are not isolated events.

An autonomous belief about literacy (note the singularity) informs the pedagogical decisions one might make.  For example, if you believe that 'literacy skills' are transferable commodities, then having students complete practice worksheets in order to develop correctness and to attend to surface structures of writing would make sense.  Similarly, one who held this belief would likely believe in the production of a single correct product.

In contrast, the boys' literate behaviors are steeped in multi-literacies as social practice.

The Essay as Multimodal Text

In education we make much of essayist prose style and certainly here in the States with the Common Core, the focus on essay is even more pronounced.  Methods to help students learn to compose essay often range from simply assigning the task to engaging learners in a process approach. It is not unusual for students to be provided with professional and student models of essays. What I believe is less usual is for teachers or learners to map essayist composing skills on to other types of texts that students want to compose, such as videos when possible.

Several years ago I was teaching a group of 8th grade students. One of the students helped me to learn that writing skills could be learned by composing other types of text. I chronicled this in Difficult Flows and Waves: Unfixing Beliefs in a Grade 8 Language Arts Literacy Class (English Education, 1998).

As the school year progressed—hyperlearning occurred. For example, I watched as Tony’s command of writing responses to EWT-like writing prompts improved, even though he was not spending much time actually doing this specific activity. Rather, Tony spent a lot of time creating Hyperstudio™ projects by working with story boards. To do this he had to begin to organize information and locate pieces of the information on different Hyperstudio™ cards. He also had to create transitions and did so by using musical cues that served to join his cards into a coherent whole.

“I need a button, here,” Tony tells me one morning, pointing to a written
essay he had been working on.

“A button?” I ask, unsure.

“Yeah, you know, like when you move to the next card.”

“Oh, like a transition,” I say, beginning to see that Tony understands that the essay is like a Hyperstudio™ composition.

“Yeah.”

I suspect Tony drew upon that deeper structure of thinking he frequently
used to create his Hyperstudio™ projects when writing responses to EWT
prompts. Tony had indirectly learned how to elaborate and better organize
his written responses by creating and using story boards when composing
through hypermedia (p. 39).

Thinking about Tony makes me wonder if we have we begun to map our students' multimodal work in order to ascertain what similarities there might be between these works and the essay they are often assigned at school? Are there associational bridges we might build between work students choose to compose and the types of composing, such as analytic essay that are frequently assigned at school?

For example, if we look at this trailer produced by a 12-year old--are there entry points we might leverage to make sense of the work and relate it to school-text types?  This represents this boy's first attempt at creating a trailer to advertise a Minecraft server. The text is meant to be persuasive.




Would it be possible to make use of this text as an entry point into a discussion about persuasion? Might this be a bit more compelling for the learner than the countless 'practice essays' he has been or will be assigned at school in preparation for state assessments? Might there be better transfer of learning if the studied text was one the child had composed?

What does this young boy know about point of view? About narrative? About linkages between story and persuasion? Community and persuasion?  Citing sources?  What does he still need to learn? What confusions are present in his text?

I can't help but think how different learning might be, if we began with the important products students are composing out of school and worked from there.





*Essayist examples from CCSS: Write arguments to support claims with clear reasons and relevant evidence; Write informative/explanatory texts to examine a topic and convey ideas, concepts, and information through the selection, organization, and analysis of relevant content

**Theorist included: Courtney Cazden, Harvard University, Graduate School of Education, USA; Bill Cope, National Languages and Literacy Institute of Australia, Centre for Workplace Communication and Culture, University of Technology, Sydney, and James Cook University of North Queensland, Australia; Norman Fairclough, Centre for Language in Social Life, Lancaster University, UK; Jim Gee, Hiatt Center for Urban Education, Clark University, USA; Mary Kalantzis, Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies, James Cook University of North Queensland, Australia; Gunther Kress, Institute of Education, University of London, UK; Allan Luke, Graduate School of Education, University of Queensland, Australia; Carmen Luke, Graduate School of Education, University of Queensland, Australia; Sarah Michaels, Hiatt Center for Urban Education, Clark University, USA; Martin Nakata, School of Education, James Cook University of North Queensland, Australia.



Work Cited
Street, B. V. (1984). Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Inconsequential Noticings, Ruptures & Lines of Flight

Coming through the Rye (2010, M.A. Reilly)

It is often in the seemingly inconsequential noticings that more profound meaning emerges.  This type of moment may be characterized as line of flight.  Steve Best and Douglas Keller (1991) say a line of flight is "the full fledged deterritorializing movements away from molar identity where cracks becomes ruptures and the subject is shattered in a process of  becoming multiple. This is the plane of creativity and desire, and also of death and destruction" (p. 100).

Hmm. A lot to unpack in that statement.

The other evening my son told me that a friend of ours who is also a middle school teacher (Mr D) is developing 'mad Minecraft skills.' The 'teacher' had recently joined my son's Minecraft server and is playing with others on the server--mostly boys from around the world ages 9 to 15.  Mr D, I am told,  entered clearly in the role of learner.

Son: Mr D is not the teacher on Minecraft.
Me: How so? 
Son: Well he's learning and he's quick, but he isn't a teacher even though, you know, he is one.  He's got mad Minecraft skills, though. 
Me: Not surprising. Mr. D is really bright.
Son: I know, but he's the learner and right now it's like I'm the teacher. He's building just like I did when I started.
Me: How's that?
Son: He's got this airborne farm going and he's got a huge mine. That's what I did at first, too. It's like he's me.

This one-minute exchange with a child as he heads off to bed gets me thinking about the perceptions of teacher and learner from the vantage point of student.  Mr D is in the process of establishing a gaming center at the middle school where he works and had asked if he might join Dev's server as a way to learn a bit more before he and his students begin using Minecraft in a multi-player setting. I recognized at the time that Mr D would be learning a lot as he thought about how this virtual world of multi-players might be enacted inside a school.  What I hadn't considered was Mr D's affect on the boys who are playing on the server, especially my son. 

James Gee and Elizabeth Hayes (2011) in Language Learning in the Digital Age, define characteristics of passionate affinity spaces, such as the multi-player game Dev and Mr D are playing. Gee & Hayes write:

We have claimed that out-of-school learning in passionate affinity spaces is competition for schools as we have traditionally thought of them. Learning in these spaces is organized quite differently than in schools. Often people of different ages are together. Different people teach or mentor at different times. The emphasis is on problem solving centered on a shared theme or endeavor, not on “content” derived from a discipline (p. 73).

Curious in weeks to come to see what develops as to roles inside this Minecraft world. Specifically I am wondering what spaces are created and filled when the more traditional roles of teacher and learner shift and alter? Do nontraditional learning spaces such as a Minecraft community provide different types of occasions for the production of lines of flight than traditional classroom spaces where teacher and student roles are maintained? What happens to roles when Mr D resituates the Minecraft community he is envisioning within a middle school environment? In what ways are identities that are composed inside the Minecraft community lines of flight that become ruptures within the school community as subjects are shattered in a process of  becoming multiple?

Wondering what you think about this.


Works Cited
Best,Steven and Kellner, Douglas (1991). Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. New York: Guilford Press.

Gee, James Paul and Hayes, Elisabeth R. (2011). Language and Learning in the Digital Age.  T & F Books UK. Kindle Edition.

A Disconnection Btw School Based Learning and Life Beyond

Other World (M.A. Reilly,  2910)

Before going to bed, a 12-year-old said to his mom:

Tomorrow when I get home from school I'll quick do my homework and then I have to build a world on Minecraft.

Hmm.

Enuf said.

On Mindful Work and Learners/Not Homework

To Think Away The Grass, The Trees, The Clouds (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

We've had a few days off from work here in New Jersey and during parts of the last four days, I have had the occasion to hear my son on line skyping with friends who were helping him to release his new Minecraft server which went public on Saturday. I sometimes forget that he is talking with other boys given the seriousness of the tone, the strategy of the play, the banter.  They talk a lot: the entire time they are each at their own homes with headphones on, audio skyping, and relaying step-by-step what they are doing/thinking.  The amount of talk is pretty significant.  There is no one to "call on" each player to talk. They talk at will and there doesn't seem to be any 'engagement' problems.

Really would like you to assist him, G as he is going to be a good client on the server. We need to make sure we pay a little more attention.
T, I need you to use your programming skills with a plug in. Can you help me there?

Did you vet him? 
I think he's a griefer. 
Check him out.
Wow, he's been banned all over.


I just claimed land so we're safe.
Oh they banned me. Oh well different account time. I'm going to come in with a different account.

Slash F closed.  Slash F, space, join then CIA. Do you have access to two?

Dude, he hacked my facebook account. You can't have him on the server.

My first objective is to mine diamond. Wherever I find diamonds there's always water. Why is there always an underground lake?

You've got like 40 diamond clusters next to you. Do you see them?
Yeah. You want me to get them?
Do it.

If I didn't make him get off the computer now and then (time to take a shower, eat dinner, rake leaves, etc.) I don't think he would move.  I am reminded as I watch the intensity with which he designs, interacts, and plays--how sharply this contrasts with the way he attends to most school-based work. For example, last week was the book report project: a paper bag he had to decorate with a drawing, a synopsis of the book, a paragraph about an internal conflict and a paragraph about an external conflict. Inside the bag he had to place 5 to 7 artifacts related to his book.  The book he had read was Joseph Heller's Catch 22. If you know the text, you know that finding artifacts to put in the bag can be a bit of a challenge. In many ways the text doesn't lend itself very well to the paper bag book project.

This example of homework, may in fact be an excellent assignment, but would more than likely work better if learners at least had some choice in the matter. There well may be books where putting artifacts in a bag makes great sense and learners who would think so.  Likely too, there will be learners and texts for whom this task doesn't make a lot of sense. Agency matters as it is directly connected to thinking.  And that is what I want to write about here. 

Failure to do homework or to value homework is not an issue of working hard. As the four-day Minecraft work shows, working hard is not avoided. Rather, failure to do or desire to do homework is a matter of agency.  We won't alleviate the 'problem' of not doing homework if we don't address the question of agency. 

For example, instead of asking a learner:  

How best do you think you might represent what you have learned here?  Or 
How would you show that you are confused by this?  Or 
What aspect of the work do you think is important to share and with whom? 
Is it important to represent your learning?
What do you do when you have nothing to say?
And so on...

We often simply determine the homework and issue the tasks to the students. These assignments are collected and often graded and then used as evidence of how well the learner is learning.  What does completion of the paper bag project actually demonstrate about the learner?  Does this assigning, grading, and reporting even remotely make sense?

I was reading Tobey Steeves's (@symphily) post, Curricular praxis: Representation as 'buggery' and legitimation for the public good, and was stopped by this section:

Are ‘legitimate’ forms of knowledge those which can be relayed on a multiple choice test, or – more broadly – those which can be represented or entextualized? If so, how might one paint a whisper, write a cloud, or sculpt a breeze? Common manifestations of representational thinking in schools include report cards, labeling deviance and naturalizing dividing practices, and interpretation. Report cards present the illusion of objectivity, reducing the inexplicable to abstractions like ‘A’ or 3.0, and problematically contribute to the sorting and managing of bodies. It must be remembered that labeling and dividing students according to essentialistic categories circumscribes the process of subjection, and the internalization of labels is a key element in the maintenance of hegemony... 

The internalization of labels is a key element in the maintenance of hegemony. Wow. That really makes me stop and take a deeper look at the book project, the B+, the quiz grade. These practices are often hegemonic as there is a subjugation of the learner as s/he has no voice in the matter. In many ways it mimics a Catch 22. The outcome has already been determined and regardless of logic/desire it cannot be redesigned.

I can imagine some of you may be thinking of possible counter arguments. One I have heard goes something like this:

Well, these kids are going to have to do work they don't determine when they get to the work force. They might as well get some practice now.  Not everything is fun and games.

And I don't doubt that could be true--that in fact my son, and perhaps yours, will work someday and be assigned work to do.  But isn't it shortsighted to think that the best way to learn how to figure out work you have been assigned is to  practice getting work on a nightly basis and complying for 10 to 13 years? Is it compliance that we are teaching? And if it is, is that the best we can offer?

Nothing would thrill me more than my son arriving home with work that mattered so much to him, that he designed and was so very essential that he jumped into the work with great intensity and interest.  We simply have never seen that happen, apart from independent book reading when has been allowed to select the text and read it as he likes (not being held to only reading 1 chapter a night, etc.).

How hard would it be to:

• negotiate curriculum and evaluation with learners?
• create enough space in the day-to-day work so that their voices would not only need to be sounded, but also heard?

 Bottom line?

If we don't start making these changes, learners will leave schools as soon as they can and opt for other ways to learn.

We are Pando: Rhizomatic Learning*

Candid (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

It is an unbearably hot day as my husband, son and I slowly motor home to New Jersey from Washington D.C.  From the back of the car I can hear my son talking and I turn and see him hunkered down in the seat, wearing headphones and holding his phone in one hand.

Who are you talking to?

Tom.

Tom?

Yeah, Tom from London.

‘Tom from London’ is a 13-year old who plays Minecraft on my 12-year-old son's server.  He and a dozen boys, ranging from 9- to 15-years-old from North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia, are avid Minecraft players on the server. Their play represents a contrasting way to think about learning from what is offered as usual fare at schools.  James Gee and Elizabeth Hayes (2011) might classify the boys’ play as an example of a passionate affinity space where “people organize themselves in the real world and/or via the Internet (or a virtual world) to learn something connected to a shared endeavor, interest, or passion” (p. 69). 

I think of passionate affinity spaces as rhizomatic and want to suggest that such learning offers us an alternative to schooling.  A rhizome, the horizontal stem of a plant, usually found underground, sends out roots and shoots, each of which can be self-sustaining.  Margie Driscoll (2004) defines rhizome as:

a tangle of tubers with no apparent beginning or end. It constantly changes shape, and every point in it appears to be connected with every other point (p. 389).

Now think about the boys and their play. They hail from across the globe and horizontally connect with one another in this passionate affinity space where they learn deeply.

For more than a decade, I have been considering how the rhizome might function as metaphor and model for education.  The traditional view of education situates schooling as a function of transference of expert-determined content from teacher to student. U.S. school systems tend to rely on hierarchy as the privileged school organization method used to distribute content and pedagogical practices, most often in the form of sanctioned programs developed by external experts and then purchased for teachers who are told to transfer the content to students.

The Constancy of Waves (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

In contrast a rhizomatic learning community is a fluid collective where participants dwell in the middle of things and where learning emerges informed by a blend of explicit and tacit knowledge. In conceiving of rhizomatic learning, it helps to think of learners resembling a sea of "middles,” who are continuously formed and reformed based on alliances determined by needs, interests, directions, questions, redirections, assessments, and commitments. Unlike the design of many traditional schools, a rhizomatic learning space is based on joining and rejoining.

In rhizomatic learning, thinking resembles the tangle of roots and shoots, both broken and whole.  Problem framing and decision-making rest with all learners. Again, Driscoll’s description of rhizomatic learning is important. She writes:

Break the rhizome anywhere and the only effect is that new connections will be grown. The rhizome models the unlimited potential for knowledge construction, because it has no fixed points…and no particular organization (p. 389).

Historically, when confronted with student achievement concerns, there has been a tendency to tighten control in an effort to increase learning largely because what has counted as knowing has been limited to a perceived ‘set’ body of content.  Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown (2011) describe this learning :

…as a series of steps to be mastered, as if students were being taught how to operate a machine or even, in some cases, as if the students themselves were machines being programmed to accomplish tasks. The ultimate endpoint of a mechanistic perspective is efficiency: the goal is to learn as much as you can, as fast as you can (Thomas & Brown, Location 327 of 2399).

In this mistaken schema, knowledge has been consistently situated as stable—as that which can be listed in a set of standards and given to teachers to transfer. 

But we know that knowledge is not stable (Schon, 1983; Thomas & Brown, 2011). Thomas and Brown state, "[m]aking knowledge stable in a changing world is an unwinnable game” (Location 503 of 2399).   Knowledge actually has never been stable, but given the disruptive power of the Internet, what counts as knowledge is a shifting matter that is more easily recognized, especially by those holding power whose concept of knowing in the past was often situated as truth. One only has to think of the Great Chain of Being to understand how the sanctity of knowing was often a matter of power.

In contrast to such certainty, Thomas and Brown posit that there is a new culture of learning informed by

a massive information network that provides almost unlimited access and resources to learn about anything…[and] a bounded and structured environment that allows for unlimited agency to build and experiment with things within these boundaries (Location 63 of 2399).

This new culture of learning is inherently rhizomatic as it orients itself horizontally, not vertically, requiring us to value tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge--knowing more than one can tell--requires a decidedly different type of learning environment than what is currently favored at school where knowledge transfer is the privileged method. Tacit knowledge is not acquired from other; it requires learning through mind, body and senses and is facilitated by experimentation and inquiry.

At Play

For gamers, like my son, experimentation and inquiry are the methods most often employed when solving design and game-based problems. For the last several months I have been researching the learning that takes place inside my son’s Minecraft play with his on-line friends.  Five dominant learning trends have emerged out of this rhizomatic environment and one societal insight.

1.    Play matters and is a means by which learners come to know their relationship to others. The learning that happens between and among the boys is play-based and informed by their interest in experimenting and imagining. For example, my son developed a vending machine in Minecraft. Originally the buyer would place a coin in the machine and would receive however many items as s/he wanted.  This proved to be a bit impractical and over time rather dull and with the help of another player, my son modified the idea so that one coin would get a player one item. This idea was later modified again so that the player would also get his coin returned along with the item. To make these alterations required changing the wiring so that the machine reset after the item was delivered and that the delivery of the new item and the return of the coin were synchronized. Making these changes happen required playfulness, not linearity. As my son explained, “I had to fool around a bit and test out ways to make the pressure plate work. I couldn’t see how it would be possible.” When I asked him why he would return the coin to the player, he said that he didn’t want to exclude anyone from playing. Whereas everyone on the server had some coin they could use, not all had the same. “I wanted them to make a commitment by playing a coin, but I didn’t want to take their coins. We’re friends.”

2.    Sustained conversation represents the dominant method for inquiry and is suggestive of the boys’ emerging sense of agency. My son engages in sustained conversations via Skype with the other players in order to brainstorm, innovate, find multiple solutions, complete tasks, hypothesize, and engage in play. Talk is important and in the horizontal world of game playing, it is not limited to or controlled by a teacher. John Goodlad (2004) reported in his research about schools that teachers “out-talked the entire class of students three to one” (p. 229). Central to these learners’ Minecraft play is the sense of agency they possess. Thomas and Brown (2011) explain, "unlike traditional notions of learning which position the learner as a passive agent of reception, the aporia/epiphany structure of play makes the player's agency central to the learning process. How one arrives at the epiphany is always a matter of the tacit. The ability to organize, connect, and make sense of things is a skill characteristic of a deep engagement with the tacit and the process of indwelling" (Location 1381 of 2399).

3.    The players participate in collaborative knowledge-making (Cormier, 2008) in which they share screens, work in tandem, continue and revise one another’s tentative ideas in an effort to solve design problems and complete tasks. Engaging in trial and error, experimenting, making use of on-line and off-line resources, and altering established models are some of the ways the boys accomplish game-based tasks. Interestingly when I ask my son how something in the game came to be he is unable to attribute it to a single player. The knowledge produced does not belong to one person, but rather is composed collectively. Dave Cormier (2008) explains, "rhizomatic model of learning…is not driven by predetermined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process" (np).

4.    These rhizomatic learning spaces the boys inhabit are inherently native to their own ground even as they involve learners from across vast geographic spaces. Membership in the game shifts and changes across time and expertise is not determined by social markers such as age, race, or credentials—although gender does seem to be a condition presently.  As learners work alone, in pairs, small groups, and large collectives--new alliances form and break. The boys’ game playing represents a rhizomatic map; an open possibility that is: “detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted, to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2002, p.12).

5.    The players choose to participate in hard work each and every day. They set tasks to be completed and establish timelines to do so. As Jane McGonigal (2011) reports: “Games make us happy because they are hard work that we choose for ourselves” (p. ). Choice matters and learning is fun, although sadly most of the boys do not seem to characterize their play in the games as learning. The exception to this is the boy from Canada.

6.    Game play leads to developing novel products in the virtual world that could have implications in the actual world. For example, a few months after my son viewed images I had made in Camden, NJ of partially demolished and boarded buildings, he showed me a self-repairing bridge and building he had designed in Minecraft. He suggested that if infrastructures such as buildings and bridges could self-repair, then people living in urban areas where poverty and societal neglect have dominated the landscape would be able to live in better conditions.

When I ask my son what he has been learning he says he’s learned how to work with others; how to search, locate, and evaluate information; how to run an effective server and negotiate a contract with a company to host the server; how to barter services in exchange for money to pay for the server; how to explain an installation process of mods to others; how to create a mod; how to anticipate a partner’s play in a game; how to build a structure with someone not in the same room; how to imagine a place and build it; how to give and take ideas; how to make mistakes in order to progress in a game; how to build a design based on someone’s idea; how to script; how to model; how to resolve social problems when they arise; how to use resources, online and offline, to guide building; how to make games inside of games; how to make films and upload them to YouTube; and how to narrow the focus of a film. During this learning, the boys are also learning about one another: siblings, where they live, currency, geography, food, politics, and all things Minecraft. My son is adamant that this playing is not learning.

It's not like school, he tells me repeatedly.

Sadly, I think he's right.

Applying Rhizomatic Sensibilities to ‘Learner’ Design

Counting (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

So, if rhizomatic learning such as my son experiences in his game-playing is not like school, how do we begin to make the necessary changes so that children choose to work hard and learn deeply?  Continuing the current push by federal and state governments for increased school standardization is not an answer. An important shift needs to occur in order for the tight grip of school standardization to be loosened.  Thomas and Brown (2011) identify three critical dimensions of learning: knowing, making, and playing. Such learning is antithetical to standardization. 

We need alternatives to the traditional method of industrial schooling.

As we begin to name alternative learning experiences, such as passionate affinity spaces, as viable learning--the idea of school as the de facto response to the question--“How do we educate children?”--will be challenged.  Certainly, there have been alternatives to traditional school raised and offered in the past.  What makes these times different is that in the past, it was difficult, if not improbable, to connect innovators who were challenging the status quo of schooling.  That is not the case today. Mass can be built by connecting those of us offering alternatives. Connecting with one another is rhizomatic.

So it is not a single reform method that is being offered. We have been too long trying to find a single reform. Rather, to disrupt the established power of schooling requires a long tail revolution. Chris Anderson explains:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.

As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers.

 

It's not about offering the reform answer, but rather remaining in the middle where connections can be made and remade.  It's about each of us doing great work, not work that needs to be replicated, but rather work that is unique, native to its own ground.  The challenge is to know we are there and to connect our work.

To connect great work is an antidote to mass standardization.

Leveraging social media to share stories and work, to try on tentative ideas, and to establish patterns are all critical.  Connecting and showcasing the small triumphs that alone may feel insubstantial, yet together represents a mass.

This is the work before each of us. On my own, I am one person.  Alongside you, I am  Pando**, a rhizomatic triumph.

Works Cited:

Anderson, Chris. (2004). The theory of the long tail. Retrieved on July 27, 2011 from: http://www.squidoo.com/longtail .

Cormier, Dave. (2008). “Rhizomatic education: Community as curriculum.” Retrieved on 2.28.11 from http://davecormier.com/edblog/2008/06/03/rhizomatic-education-community-as-curriculum/ .

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. (2002). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Continuum. 

Driscoll, Marcy P. (2004). Psychology of Learning and Instruction, 3rd Edition. Allyn & Bacon.

Goodlad, John. (1984). A place called school. New York: McGraw-Hill.

McGonigal, Jane. (2011). Reality is broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world. New York: Penguin Press.

Schön, Donald. (1983). The reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action. New York: Basic Books.

Thomas, Doug & John Seely Brown. (2011). A new culture of learning: Cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change. Create Space: Kindle.

*This post is cross-referenced . It serves as the forward to the the new text, be you: [a quiet revolution] and also a slideshare of the book which is so much bigger than this single post might ever be. It exemplifies rhizomatic thinking and being. This text has been reviewed and responded to by Monika Hardy and Thomas Steele-Malley, both of whom greatly helped me to clarify my intentions when what I wanted to say was still quite cloudy. Love you guys.

**Pando: Also known as the Trembling Giant, Pando is a clonal colony of a single male Quaking Aspen located in Utah. Each genetically-identical individual tree (or “stem”) is connected by a single root system. Spreading across more than 100 acres, Pando is believed to be over 80,000 years old and collectively weighs over 6,600 tons, making it the heaviest organism on the planet, as well as one of the oldest." from Leaf and Limb Tree Service blog

Not Your Father's PLN

I. Calling London

At first it was a bit disconcerting. My husband, son and I were driving from northern New Jersey to Washington D.C. to participate in the SOS March. From the back of the car I could hear my son talking. I turned and saw him hunkered down in the seat, wearing headphones and holding his phone. He was clearly chatting, not talking to himself.

Who are you talking to?


Tom.


Tom?


Yeah, Tom from London.

Tom from London is a 13 year old boy who plays Minecraft on my son's server. My son is 12. He and a half dozen boys, ranging from 9-years-old to 13-years-old, are avid players of Minecraft. The boys are from London, New Jersey, Russia, and Pennsylvania. In some important ways these boys are a PLN (Personal Learning Network), not that any of them would define themselves in such a manner. But they do learn from one another and do so based on a shared passion.

A few things my son says he has learned a lot about during the last few weeks his server has been up and running include: how to work with others, how to run a good server, how to explain installation process of mods, how to build together, how to give and take ideas, how to build from someone's idea, how to script, how to model, and how to resolve problems when they arise. During this learning, the boys are also learning about one another: siblings, where they live, currency, geography, and all things Minecraft. My son is adamant that this playing is not learning.

It's not like school, he tells me repeatedly.

Sadly, I think he's right.


II. Marking Time

I imagined my mom, deceased these last 11 years, along for the ride to DC and what she might have to say about the technology that allows a 12 year old while in a moving car in the United States to talk with a boy he has never met who is in London.

I can imagine her saying:

But Mary Ann, think of the cost. This must be quite dear.


Not really mom. He's skyping and it is free.

I mark time by death. My mother's passing in 2000 in many ways marks the ushering in of a world she would have delighted in, marveled at, and have been puzzled by--perhaps in the same breath. We live at a time when Internet technologies alter how we live--alter our very definitions of friendship and intimacy. My mom's friends were all people she knew. She would have had no trouble picking out a friend in a crowd. For me such definition no longer works. There are people I have "met" via Twitter who I have shared intimacies with and yet we have never physically met.  Alongside this new knowledge, I also recognize that there is a niggling distrust I carry with me of naming people I have met on line as friends.  This is a fear-based conditioning I am relinquishing as the conversations I have with these new friends morph, take on weight, allow me to adjust my schema.

For my son, the lines between physically meeting and meeting on line are inconsequential, not even a line to traverse. His idea of friend is not based on a singular reality. My son tells me he has no interest in limiting by definition what a friend is.  I push a bit and he says, A friend is someone who isn't mean, shares interests, and makes sense.   Age oddly isn't that important.

III. Seeing in the Dark

Last Tuesday during #EDCHAT, the idea of PLNs were discussed.

I wanted to suggest that the task may be for us, as educators, to recognize students' PLNs as being meaningful and to lean in and try to learn, especially from those learning networks based on student-determined passions and ones that may well reside outside of school. An important task is for us to relinquish definitions we have about learning and school. We need to look at things as they are. 

Wallace Stevens in "The Man with the Blue Guitar," tells us:

Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark


That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.

Rotted names.  I think about this, about our trip to Save Our Schools March, and wonder if the one reform we must do is one that is more personal, less institutional.  What rotted names do we repeat that keep us stuck in a time long gone? How do we allow ourselves to peer in the dark and say what we see?

Surely some of the language we use at schools has rotted. Just as my definition of friendship needs to be updated, stretched, made more inclusive--so too do we need to acknowledge that our students' learning sources will most likely be beyond the purview of school. Internet-based technologies allow for personal learning in ways most of us could not imagine a decade ago. It is simply foolish to shut the door on these actual learning networks simply because they aren't institutionalized.

Our conversation about engendering student-based PLNs, must begin with us acknowledging that alternative learning networks our students already name as their own need to be privileged.

#AskObama What If We Have it All Wrong?

I tried writing a question to President Obama and realized that what I needed to ask required more context than 140 characters might offer.  I was wondering if President Obama has the will & the courage to not emphasize standards and testing that his administration has either established or continued from the Bush years? In other words (to borrow from Reagan [clearly a first for me]} -- Can our President JUST SAY NO to standards & testing?

The USDOE and state governments have an unshakable belief in the efficacy and wisdom of national and state standards that outline "the big ideas" and list objectives organized by discrete subjects for teachers to follow. We are told that standards represent the important information to be transferred and that tests designed by companies are the best way to know if the designated information has been learned.  It's all very neat--very logical. But what if the initial assumption is inaccurate?  What if the emphasis on information-based knowledge coupled with a manic desire to test public school students every few weeks in mathematics and English Language Arts (via the PARCC Plan,60 million children ages 8 to 17, would be tested nine times a year) reduces learning, children's desire to learn, and teachers' agency to teach?

In Doug Thomas and John Seely Brown's (2011) A New Culture of Learning they explain that this new culture consists of two elements:

The first is a massive information network that provides almost unlimited access and resources to learn about anything. The second is a bounded and structured environment that allows for unlimited agency to build and experiment with things within these boundaries (Location 63 of 2399).

In contrast to this new culture of learning, we have the mechanistic view of education that President Obama's education policies and practices are maintaining. Thomas and Brown describe the mechanistic approach:

Learning is treated as a series of steps to be mastered, as if students were being taught how to operate a machine or even, in some cases, as if the students themselves were machines being programmed to accomplish tasks. The ultimate endpoint of a mechanistic perspective is efficiency: the goal is to learn as much as you can, as fast as you can (Location 327 of 2399).

In the Obama plan for education, schools are places where students must demonstrate they have received the Common Core Standards and can replicate them on tests given frequently across each school year.  Failure to demonstrate that the standards have been received can lead to retention, failure, cheating, dismissal, and cash bonuses depending on your role and the outcome.  This schema is based on the belief that what we know remains stable.

In contrast in the new culture of learning it is understood that "Making knowledge stable in a changing world is an unwinnable game"(Thomas & Brown, Location 503 of 2399). Instead of valuing only explicit knowledge, we must value tacit knowledge ("We know more than we can tell" (Polanyi as quoted in Thomas & Brown, 957 of 2399).

Like many others, Thomas & Brown conclude that "Students learn best when they are able to follow their passions and operate within the constraints of a bounded environment"(1038 of 2399).  It is challenging, if not impossible, to follow one's passions when federal and state standards outline what matters and in doing so exclude opportunities for the complicated process of a young person coming to know his/her passion(s) to happen.  The very absence of choice is problematic.

Applying the New Culture of Learning: Posing Questions About Things That Matter


As I have indicated in former posts, I have been interested in watching my 12 year old learn.  He is deeply involved in Minecraft and recently learned how to turn the family computer into a Minecraft server.  When I asked him how he had learned this he said that he watched a "ton of YouTube videos" and taught himself about the computer's operating system.

He told me: "It was a lot of trial and error. A lot of experimenting." 

I also wondered what motivated him to create his own server. Why did he do it?

He said he wanted a place where he and his friends and people he hasn't yet met but who also like to play Minecraft could play together and chat. The multi-player aspect of gaming matters to him and motivates him to learn and want to play.  When he first began playing Minecraft he played it as a single player.  He did this for about two months and then decided that he wanted the interaction with others in the world he was designing and building. I'm encouraged that he sees people he has yet to meet as potential friends.  We have discussed safety precautions as well as the more probable scenario that he will meet people who share his interests and who help him to widen and deepen those interests through play and chat. (See Will Richardson's 8 Shifts for Every Classroom: Shift 1: Do Talk to Strangers).

In the world he and others are building, my son made a replica of the Parthenon.  When I asked him how he built it he explained that he had downloaded different images of the Parthenon taken from different angles and then used the images to think about the exterior and interior of the structure as he built his replica. When he had a question, he did an image search.  He also said that he was disappointed as he could not figure out how to build a replica of the statue of Athena.

My son's interest in the Parthenon was tweaked when I told him that two high school students where I work had created a replica of the Palace of Fishbourne in Minecraft.  He figured out how to contact them via their server and was soon interacting with them.  He wanted to do what they had done: build a server and infuse a sense of history into the play.

Again Thomas and Brown discuss the importance and centrality of play, referencing Johan Huizinga (Homo Ludens): "...play is not merely central to the human experience, it is part o f all that is meaningful in human culture. Culture...does not create play; play creates culture" (Location 1359 of 2399).

Central to my son's play in Minecraft, as well as his friends who are often at our home playing or on line playing-- is the sense of agency they possess.  What I find interesting is none of the boys would be considered honor roll students. Some self describe themselves as having reading problems and disliking reading.  Some describe themselves as being "bad in math."  Many have comments on report cards that say: Easily distracted. Not working to potential.  Some have been classified hyperactive. Yet all can design and build intricate worlds with harbors full of ships and various types of homes with rooms serving different purposes, and farms, and self-repairing bridges, and portals to name but a few things. They can do this for hours.

Thomas & Brown discussing agency explain that "unlike traditional notions of learning which position the learner as a passive agent of reception, the aporia/epiphany structure of play makes the player's agency central to the learning process, How one arrives at the epiphany is always a matter of the tacit. The ability to organize, connect, and make sense of things is a skill characteristic of a deep engagement with the tacit and the process of indwelling" (Location 1381 of 2399).

My son built a server as he is in search of a guild: a group of dedicated players who actively participate in the making of the game, framing and posing questions, using answers to generate more questions, and attending to design challenges and other problems as they arise.

So Where To?

The learning world we need to engender looks little like the structure of school we know today. It is not informed by a list of standards, regardless of how clever those standards may or may not seem to be. Learning is not satisfied by having patients receive knowledge and replicate that information on national tests.  Such passivity dulls interest.

Instead, a shift needs to happen. Instead of schools being the locus of learning, we need to be open to seeing learning opportunities beyond the classroom and valuing such experiences instead of situating them as marginal.  This means that we need to be learners as well.  There are educators I have worked with or met via social networking that I would love to have looking in as my son and his friends play.  I imagine teachers like Harry Sugar or David Wees whose keen knowledge of mathematics might shape (bound) occasions based on the game playing that might help the boys to name the mathematics they are using as well as the naive understandings they may well have.

When I think about learning that is needed, I imagine a guild as well: a collection of people who are committed to learning and connected through interests and mediated online and in person. I like the idea of a bounded environment where experimentation happens and agency is privileged. I appreciate the understanding that knowledge is changing at a rate that defies us naming it, teaching it, and regurgitating it on tests. I imagine experiential learning and tacit knowledge coupled with some explicit knowledge mattering. Instead of sitting and watching, learners (students, teachers, mentors, community based experts) would be knowing, making, and playing.

How and what should be locally determined and informed by learners' interests.

Curious as to what you think & I will continue this...