stimulant

a few, tasty links (July 30th - July 31st):

• Instructables Preparing your own thin layer chromatography plates - More cheap lab equipment.
• MAKE: Blog: Open source hardware (slides) - Limor’s talk, from OSCON
• MAKE: Blog: Phillip Torrone and Limor Fried at OSCON 2007 - Limor!
• swissmiss: Permit May Be Required For Public Photography in NYC - =( Also scary. Who would want to make public private?
• ladyada?s ranting » Blog Archive » New Kit! USBtinyISP, a USB AVR programmer - More AVR from Limor.
• Staying on at school to 18 ‘can criminalise pupils’ | News | This is London - “No shit, Sherlock.”
• MAKE: Blog: HOW TO - Make your own LED bulbs - Next: combine it with a twist-in attachment.
• “Attempted infringement” appears in new House intellectual property bill - =( That’s scary.
• Recommended Books on Parallel Programming | Thinking Parallel - So, why can’t parallel programming be a web-service (i.e. ad hoc clusters, online?)
• MAKE: Blog: Mike’s Ambient device - I swear there’s a use for ambient devices.
• MAKE: Blog: Designing Automata Kit - This seems like a bunch of fun. And makeable from the picture, too.
• Ethics bill would expose lawmakers’ pet projects - CNN.com - Tools, not bills.
• MAKE: Blog: Science, tech, electronicsy videos @ Alcatel-Lucent - Some of these videos are pretty amazing.
• Recycle Old Lightbulbs Into Salt and Pepper Shakers (TreeHugger) - I have plenty of lightbulbs.
• Wired 15.01: The Perfect Human - I want to talk to him.
• Seeing Through Computers | The American Prospect - Turkle’s problems with a rising pedagogy of simulation.
• Seductions of Sim | The American Prospect - More criticism of simulations from the Prospect.
• Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: Loss for the Student Press - Justice delayed. Indefinitely. Because of the delay.
• DIY Frequency meter - Hack a Day - Cheap frequency meter.
• Biologists Helping Bookstores - See! Using the internet to mobilize a group to achieve a goal. Why don’t we learn how to do this in school?
• ~ Victory Gardens 2007 ~ - Another idea for a school: sustainable food.

Just testing out the FacePress plugin…It’s pretty amazing that within a couple days of Wordpress releasing their own Facebook app, which didn’t support independently hosted blogs, someone else picked up the slack and created a Facebook app that did.

a few, tasty links (July 29th):

• The ?Banking? Concept - A neat and useful metaphor. And a scary discussion.
• Use gperf for efficient C/C command line processing - That’s neat. A perfect hash function that generates code for command line options.
• Atiz : World Leader in Digital Camera Scanning - This is a pretty promising design. It seems easy to make it cheap and DIY-able.
• How to Make a Full Auto Book Scanner - a scientist’s toy box - I’ve been looking for a solution to this problem. I’m not sure this is it. But it’s neat. And cheap.
• Professor pans ‘learning style’ teaching method - Telegraph - I was always a little surprised at how little Gardner’s work moved me.
• Stemming the Summer Slide - washingtonpost.com - I can’t believe what this acknowledges about the fragility of schooling.
• Why Don?t We Teach Children To Be Leaders? - Fearless Dreams - Hey! That was going to be my line.
• Redundancy testing - The Boston Globe - Oh man. So much anti-SAT. Is October too far away?
• Reading, Writing, Running a Company - EntrepreneurshipWeek USA - Kauffman Foundation - Entrepreneurship as an alternative default for livelihood is an exciting idea, for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is that I think it is synonymous with more freedom.
• Certain Degrees Now Cost More at Public Universities - New York Times - Commodifying education. Shop for a degree in your course catalogue.
• MIT duo see people-powered “Crowd Farm” - MIT News Office - Harnessing the energy of crowds.

From Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom:

“Almost all our teachers at Booker T. Washington were black women. They were committed to nurturing intellect so that we could become scholars, thinkers, and cultural workers — black folks who user our “minds.” We learned early that our devotion to learning, to a life of the mind, was a counter-hegemonic act, a fundamental way to resist every strategy of white racist colonization. Though they did not define or articulate these practices in theoretical terms, my teachers were enacting a revolutionary pedagogy of resistance that was profoundly anticolonial. […]

Attending school then was sheer joy. I loved being a student. I loved learning. School was the place of ecstasy — pleasure and danger. To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone. […]

School changed utterly with racial integration. Gone was the messianic zeal to transform our minds and beings that had characterized teachers and their pedagogical practices in our all-black schools. Knowledge was suddenly about information only. It had no relation to how one lived, behaved. (emphasis mine) It was no longer connected to antiracist struggle. Bussed to white schools, we soon learned that obedience, and not a zealous will to learn, was what was expected of us.

Some universities are apparently now charging more for various degrees, depending on the cost of providing those degrees.

That’s scary for a lot of reasons. The most naive of which is that the sciences will undoubtedly become more expensive. But the really frightening part is what it says about the commodification of education. The policy legitimizes the

Education is a commodity. Doesn’t that scare anyone?

It means that what Freire called the “banking model” of education¹ is increasingly entrenched, to the point that we shop for packets of knowledge like candy.

Note that I’ve no elegant solution to the problem of funding pursuits that aren’t self-supporting. In general, I haven’t thought carefully about education in “the arts.” I’ve only been able to wrap my head around it [pedagogically] by incorporating it as a tool into wider pursuits. And increasingly, I’m suspicious that my denigration of the idea of a classically trained scientist² is a conclusion that was already reached by the artistic community. That is, a classically trained artist is no longer as interesting as an artist whose ideas provide a context for their technical skills.

I have to confess, I don’t know anything about education in the arts.

Anyway, I guess my point is this: giving the acquisition of skills and knowledge a context whereby the acquisition becomes incidental seems to be a strong idea. But let me emphasize, this shouldn’t be a trick. This isn’t a pedagogical sleight designed to achieve the acquisition of skills. The idea is that the acquisition of skills is actually incidental to what people should be doing. Lots of careful thought and work should be put into engineering an environment where the resources that learners need are at their disposal, and where the acquisition of skills and knowledge is streamlined. But the motivation for this is not³ the skills themselves.

Does that make sense? There seems to be a lot of thinking to do insofar as restructuring not only the learning experience, but the language we use to describe the learning experience. Language that emphasizes packets of knowledge or skills inevitably leads to a tension between a curricula’s archaeology, its compartmentalization, and the context provided for learning.

1. “[when education] becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the ‘banking’ concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits.” [↩]
2. i.e. someone whose training focuses on the classical canon of a specific discipline [↩]
3. i.e. should not be [↩]

“The practice or policy of making merely a token effort or granting only minimal concessions, esp. to minority or suppressed groups.”

That’s an awfully useful word.

a few, tasty links (July 28th):

• Teenager, students jailed for having extremist material - Uhh, what? Being in possession of extremist material is a crime?
• Teachers increasingly taking out malpractice insurance : National : DAILY YOMIURI ONLINE (The Daily Yomiuri) - That sure is scary.
• Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: The Wrong Traditions in Admissions - Confluence! Have to write more about this. And capitalize on it!
• Martin Luther King - Letter from Birmingham Jail - He sure could write.
• Switchmode power supply hacking (power your laser) - Hack a Day - One small part of that one-day cheap laser cutter.
• Javablog » Tips for writing FaceBook applications in Java - Maybe one day? I’m still dubious of FaceBook applications…
• Instructables Make a Ball Mill in 5 Minutes - Finally!
• MAKE: Blog: Make a Tabletop Biosphere - Make: PDFcast - This would be pretty neat to have.
• Mimetic House, Dromehair, Ireland (TreeHugger) - I’ve consistently fascinated by the theme I first encountered in Illich’s “Tools for Conviviality”: that of the evils of distancing people from themselves. Whether it’s doctors distancing us from taking care of our bodies or architecture from our homes.
• Participate! A Contest by TH and Current TV to Get You - And Your Best Eco-Ideas - to the Burning Man Event (TreeHugger) - Any ideas?
• Google Code for Educators - Google sure has broad goals.

At my school, students will be responsible for the upkeep of the campus. There are plenty of issues implementing this (scheduling tasks, training students for various jobs, etc.) but I’m confident that I can make it work. I’ll write more about my thoughts on the problem at some point.

But right now, I want to talk about a fundamental shift in the way we think about the products of an education, beginning with a recent idea of mine: using a school’s resources (specifically money, a captive audience, and the public eye) to support a technology that needs customers more than it needs allies: electric/hybrid/biodiesel/sustainable cars.

Imagine a university that maintained a fleet of sustainable vehicles, maintained and driven by students. Students would be trained in their care and maintenance by a few (one?) person, and then go on to pass on that knowledge. This fleet would be open for use by the community. Every time you needed a car, you’d go, give it a pre-drive inspection, drive it, and come back. If a problem is found in the inspection, the last person to drive it and the person looking to drive it come in and fix it together, with help, if needed.

Insurance is provided for by the university (more on that at a later date, too). Given that cars would be constantly maintained, they’d last the way they’re supposed to. And students would learn simple, useful skills. And the university would be taking significant steps toward not only raising awareness, but capability, feasibility, and likelihood. Every student would leave (presumably) as a converted and ready customer for alternative transportation.

In general, this model of using a communal model of resources to manage the cost and risk of integrating students with real world tasks seems like a pretty strong model. Particularly exciting is the prospect of drawing on the community to build and maintain the school’s infrastructure, given that those are precisely the types of experiences I’d love to provide for.

Consider developing an audio lab or a model for a cheap, robust, high-quality studio. Instead of purchasing everything, engineer it in house, and build it in house. The labor is itself educational and fun, and the product is a more maintainable, more robust community resource.

Of course, all of this leads very naturally to another idea I’m awfully excited to explore: continual redesign and reimplementation of lab equipment, in house. Scientists (particularly in the life sciences) seem further and further removed from their tools. What if instead, they built and engineered their tools, and in the process improved not only their design, but their economy and scalability? These all seem like natural steps to take toward opening up science and breaking down the compartmentalization of knowledge-creation in the sciences. Right now, companies and universities do that. Why is all that structure necessary? What if more energy were expended toward developing things like a $10 PCR machine? What if the barrier to doing high-quality science wasn’t the years of schooling you “need” to be part of the club, but a few hundred dollars and some curiosity?

And this is that “fundamental shift” I mentioned. Right now, we think of schools as producing students. Research universities produce graduate students and research. But what if education were the byproduct of producing valuable and important things that the world needs? Whether this is research or low-cost lab equipment or a scalable system for communal transport — what if we were to shift the focus from who students were (what they know) to what they do?

A friend of mine sent me this email recently:

“I’ve been thinking about why people don’t seem to care at all about changing education — regardless of whether they personally do anything about it. (I’ve talked to a few people since talking to you.) First of all, people don’t agree and this is a hard thing to convince them of, which is reasonable; it took me some time to be convinced. I spent a hour or so last night trying to convince [a mutual friend] that 5.12 was not a good class (not that any class is particularly good…) in that the goal of the class was to memorize specific facts and not in any way learn how to learn or learn how to approach solving problems. In the end, most people, except maybe organic chemists (who only comprise a small fraction of the class), forget most of the material and wasted a semester on pointless psets and cramming for tests. Second of all, it seems that people have this notion that if they’ve come out ahead in the game in the current system that other people should have to suffer through it too and that other smart people will come out ahead too. Or rather, that since they’re done with school they just don’t care enough to even think about such issues. I find this attitude particularly strange and was surprised that people thought this way. However, upon thinking about this further I am rather convinced this attitude is prevalent at MIT (and maybe elsewhere as well). I am consistently nearly last when filling out course evaluations and seem to be one of only a few to write any comments on the back whatsoever. (No wonder courses at MIT continue to suck.) I have no idea how people (like you) working on such reform can convince people that education does matter and that there should be a debate about how it’s done.”

First of all, let me note that I’d consider this friend of mine a “model” student. They’ve had, nominally, the best education available. And gleaned every benefit from mastering the system. And still, their dissatisfaction is clear.

Anyway, this dovetails into an idea that’s been increasingly on my mind lately: learning how to change things. As trite as that sounds, the fact that our graduation speeches go out and tell us to change the world after being stuck in classes for four, eight, ten years is a pretty obnoxious irony. Reform and social change are hard, ill-posed problems with no clear-cut solutions. Having good intentions is an infinitesimal part of effecting change. So why don’t we learn how to stage a protest, how to bring a bill before our legislature, how to start a non-profit, how to write great rhetoric, how to work with the press, how to …

I’m not suggesting we need a class, “World Changing 101.” I am suggesting that if schools really want to educate students that are going to go on to change things for the better, the path to accomplishing that is clearly not through an immense scaffolding of academics. Students don’t do anything within school for twelve years. We go to class after class and get grades. The real content of a student is what they do outside of school, despite the overwhelming role school plays in their lives.

Note that colleges have discovered this. Among high-achieving students, their coursework and grades are components of diminishing importance when it comes to college applications. Instead, their extracurriculars, their research, their jobs and passions outside of school are what dominate an application and essays. Why is school in the way?

For me, this has been increasingly manifest recently in my attempts to become more of an activist. Whether that’s through writing articles or starting a company or developing software or staging protests, as I consider more concrete paths to change education, I find myself at a bit of a loss. I’ve plenty of ideas and enthusiasm, but I’m completely inexperienced. I don’t even have good models in mind to follow.

So to return to that email, how do I “convince people that education does matter and that there should be a debate about how it’s done?” I copped out in my reply:

“I don’t think that it’s possible to achieve significant reform or debate just by engaging people on the theoretical plane. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t keep it at the forefront of discussions; I just think that’s one component. I think that concrete actions and successes are the only way people will pay attention. Otherwise, you end up “talking” about education, when in reality, people’s value systems and ideals are clashing, and that’s the discussion you really want to be having. For instance, I think that school should be working to create happy people. That’s a pretty radical claim for most people, who accept school as an inevitably tiresome, wearing entity. And there are tons of assumptions and hidden ideas like that behind any discussion about education. I think any discussion that doesn’t address them is bound — not to fail, but to flounder. Productive ideas and action can still come out of it, but only on an interaction-by-interaction basis. The most effective reforms I’ve seen have all been proposed in the context of work done (c.f. Papert’s “Mindstorms” or the Montessori method).”

And so for now, I can only work to develop the tools and implement the reforms I want on my own, while aggressively marketing them. But that solution is so much more muddled than one would hope upon hearing that question…