Taxonomy of Frames for Innovation

Here you have it folks, in a 4 minute timelapsed writing + voice narration video. 

Having published a few weeks ago my confidence is growing that this baby is a keeper. It's actually the toolkit of a generalist innovator. "Generalist" sound dull to you? Not me - I am one, proud of it. Study widely different domains and then mash them up.. We can transform education by playing anthropologist, and seeking insights outside the domain. Anyways have a watch - you'll know within seconds if you want to keep going: Read more here, contribute here.

Make Room

Make Room

I have a riddle:

What can you create by taking something away?

- remove tables and chairs...
- remove old displays from walls and windows
- remove the lesson plan
- remove established conventions
- remove the personal histories, and assumptions
- remove goals and expectations
- remove all storage and stored items

Let the clutter fall and a lightness take its place.

You've created a blank slate.

In the clutter, who owned the space? It wasn't the teacher! It sure wasn't the learners.

The space was its own creature, self-perpetuating. The clutter took up the room, vetoing unforeseen discoveries and unrecognised passions.

Now there is room.

Anything could happen. It's a fresh day. It's a new page.

Everything in our field of vision is heavily analysed and processed by our visual cortex and 'adaptive unconscious' - our executive functions are not aware of this, it just gets dished up on a platter... a very full platter.

Those old posters still on the wall are invoking a myriad of tired neural networks, and further, a cascade of associations. It's the weight of the past. The mind uses reference lookup as a default mode, and the process has a hair trigger.

Now you've taken the posters down, and made room. Your visual cortex scans and sees a blank canvas. Subtly the blood flow in your brain shifts to support higher functions; creating the future rather than referencing the past.

An ember-sense of capacity and enlargement grows. The learner feels more receptive and expansive. 

We add back in a few items: liquid chalk for writing on the windows, ordinary chalk for the floor, butcher's paper for the walls.

And we ask: what next? what's on your heart? where shall we go?

Post-Script Vignettes: 

Notes from Frames Taxonomy

Frames are discrete, identifiable, manipulable components of our physical, virtual, mental and cultural contexts. If we don't shape them, they shape us.

- items of furniture are o-frames
- habits, lesson plans, are s-frames
- goals and agendas are n-frames
- our personal histories and sense of established roles are also n-frames

We can create these frames deliberately, but mostly they are just 'spawned' or inherited from the past, and are very often artefacts of our collective neuroses, perpetuating anxiety.

Frames get coded in our the basal ganglia (unquestioned routine) and resisting them can activate the amygdala (fear of social transgression).

Make Room, by Rachel Collis

The notion of 'making space' or 'making room' has become for me a core value in every domain, every situation.

Though your heart's a flickering no-vacancy sign,
Though your heart's forever working overtime,
Though your heart's a suitcase fully packed,
Though your heart's a disregarded artefact -

Love is spacious, love is kind,
So make room. 
Make room.

Though your heart's the city crowds on New Year's Eve,
Though your heart's been struggling for years with no reprieve,
Though your heart's economy class,
Though your heart's perpetually half-mast -

Love is spacious, love is kind,
So make room. 
Make room.

Though the bus is standing room only,
Love's not leaving anyone behind,
So make room.

Though my heart's an insensitive practical joke,
Though you fear I'll strangle you with my yoke,
Though I fight and kick and scratch and scream,

And though I need -

Love is spacious, love is kind,
So make room.

Make room.

For Me at Home 

I try to make room at home, especially room to think/write/draw. 

Today I'm going to order 'aqua notes' that I've been aware of for ages - creating room to write in the shower! Ironically on their website they also have the opposite... pure clutter, in the form of a crossword to do in the shower.  

My love affair with GTD workflow is about finding mental space to be reflective and receptive in the midst of the insane complexity of school life.

In particular, I want to feel like when there is an interruption and someone needs my help or input, I can genuinely make room for them - have a sense of generous, abundant space for them rather than the scarcity of throwaway scraps.

And how much more important is this aspiration when it comes to young learners!

Technology as Magic Dust

It ain't magic dust. And if you construe it as magic dust it will become pure poison.

Have you ever had a conversation around "how to get teachers using technology" or "how can we increase technology integration"? To me, these questions are somewhere between nonsensical and downright hazardous. 

You better watch out if you don't ask some pretty basic questions about technology first. What is this beast? And it is a BEAST.

It is our making, our undoing. We're extended through technology. We make it. It makes us.

Subtle...​

Our joy, our despair, curing diseases & promising hope, lobotomising, alienating, destroying & saving lives via proxy. Amplifying, dissolving. Scaling beyond design specs...

Have you got a philosophy of technology? Metaphysics even? If you like, theology. A robust master system?

Anything other than fish-in-water will do. Fish swim default, get caught.

These words are in your brain, munching on your neurons. How did they get there again? You have information about what I typed at my kitchen table, yet I don't even know who you are. How very asymmetrical. ..

Alice Leung Does Stochastic Tinkering

I noticed Alice Leung tweeting about tinkering with the configuration of her classroom:

There developed a lovely conversation between her and @sarahjohanna :

Now I really resonated with what was going on here  and what I often notice in Alice's tweets: a constant energetic questioning and tinkering, and then reflecting on the results. Apart from anything else, I just want to shout a hearty 'hear hear!' and celebrate the moment.

The exchange also sparked some associations and I've thrown them here below: 

"Stochastic Tinkering"

I picked this lovely phrase up from Nassim Taleb in his books "The Black Swan" and "Antifragile". By stochastic he means random. For me, the word has connotations of deliberate intent to shake things up... staccato stabs at innovation. 

Stochastic tinkering isn't far off notions of edu-hacking. 

Taxonomy of Frames

In my 'frames' taxonomy for innovation, Alice is tinkering with "o-frames" - organisational frames. In this case, they are the physical frames in her learning space, consisting of furniture, empty space, etc, within the broader o-frame of the classroom building itself.

Alice observes that "HS teachers don't really think about learning space layout".  

My aspiration for the 'frames' taxonomy is to expose these arbitrary elements and make them more susceptible to innovation. Alice, of course, does this instinctively.

Frames are for edu-hacking, stochastic tinkering.

Design Thinking  vs Hacking

I've noticed Design Thinking is getting more and more traction in educational circles. Indeed I myself have become rather besotted by it.  I suspect that within a year or two it will have the same horrible simplistic buzz word status as flipped learning, PBL, gamification. 

All these models wander in and out of the edu-zeitgeist.

As much as I love Design Thinking, I wouldn't want it to become a dogma to replace "fly by the seat of your pants" hacking/tinkering.

So much of life, experience, and nature, and everything is composed of ad-hoc tinkering.

Hacking is immediate, contextual, empowered, and subversive! It provides its own research data, because it either works immediately & sticks or it doesn't and doesn't.

A blog post contrasting Design Thinking with hacking is here, with lots of further links.

Google 20% Rule in Schools - Project Breakthroughs

Since 2011 I've been posting occasionally on our experiment in Years 9 and 10 and my school to see if we could apply the fabled Google 20% Rule - students spend 20% of their time on a blank slate passion project.

NSW Board of Studies No Barrier

We are exploiting the fact that in NSW, the Board of Studies (BOS) does not require Year 9 and 10 students to fill their school hours entirely with B.O.S. endorsed courses.  Once all the boxes are ticked, there's still at least 500 hours across the two years available as a blank slate. You can do a lot with 500 hours!

Building a 'Soft' Syllabus / Assessment Grid

My colleague Talar Khatchoyan has done a wonderful job creating a 'soft' syllabus & assessments to suit the course. I mean 'soft' as in 'soft-coded' - the outcomes adapt to any project!  

Which is fortunate, because from previous posts you'll see we've had social justice campaigns, albums recorded, robots constructed, novels written. So I thought I had seen it all, when I recently read a proposal by a student to study and decode horse body language. What an amazing idea! "Approved!"

2013 Example - Jacob's Ultima-Bot

Here is one example of a project - a ridable robot:

Jacob's project has these elements, typical for the program:

• a learning log - http://reminvent.weebly.com/ultimabot-blog.html (please do drop by of course)
• expert input 'pulled' from appropriate sources as needed (contrast to schooling where expertise is 'pushed' out on a teacher's schedule)
• ongoing mentoring by experts, sought out by Jacob. (Since 2011 where I mentioned the 'granny cloud' we now ask the students to seek out an appropriate expert mentor wherever possible, and this is working very well, very efficiently)
• a project mentor, in Jacob's case this is me, who is separate from an expert in the field. The project mentor acts as a kind of Socrates, asking questions about planning, materials, skills needed, identifying 'unknowns' and areas for further inquiry, setting targets and defining concrete 'next actions', setting the bar ever higher, looking for opportunities for publication, etc.  

Field Expert versus Project Mentor

Notice we deliberately separate out the two roles  of:

subject expert,

from

project mentor.

This has enormous strategic importance as we explore scaling the program up to encompass, potentially, hundreds of students, who at any given time might be seeking expert input from an ever-shifting veritable spectrum of disciplines, but can still be anchored to a generic project mentor.

Great Things Afoot

...I'll post more on the project soon!