sharing resources

unpacking a quiet revolution – 2 of 5

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shared spaces

Lisa Gansky writes in the Mesh:

Waste represents the underutilization of existing resources..that value unused is equal to waste. In natural systems, waste is never wasted. In nature, wasted from one system is food for another. The challenge .. is how to retrieve value from wasted of all types, such as idle cars of equipment. It’s finding value products that can be repaired rather than earrmarked for the dump. The mesh invites and enables the recovery of that waste as value.

Assuming we are also recovering parts of ourselves – mental spaces we have previously considered as waste and now realize as value, let’s also look to physical spaces and things.

Imagine using technology to dream and connect, ie: google sketch up of city, neighborland, myblocknyc, sonar.me ..
Imagine leveling the playing field for dreamers, ie: collaboratory/community table.
Imagine having more time for gatherings that matter. Imagine having more time to think in your head, and your community’s collective head, to decide what gatherings matter…what are we about, what do we want as a community, what do we need…?
Imagine boldly calling into question anything that doesn’t fit into a “this matters” category.

How do we engender spaces where joy is more important, more salient than core content standards and an endless sea of standardized tests and the accompanying narrow pedagogy that gets enacted in order for students to get ready for such minutia? – Mary Ann Reilly’s post

Imagine community as school, community as curriculum (Dave Cormier) with the entire city as the floorplan. The high school buildings become resource centers and meet up spaces. There is a city-wide art hall and engineering hall, forensics hall. The town acts more like a university campus.. where people are walking and biking to and from buildings through the course of a day.

We need a move toward a more practical, sustainable learning model that is less based on market-driven accreditation and more on the inevitable give and take that happens among people who engage in similar activities and share similar forms of literacy and worldviews. – Dave Cormier

As we offer more options for learning, we find we don’t need more resources. When we simply start talking to people in our community, we come to find out, the lady down the street has been translating Japanese for years, the man across the street is a lawyer on the board for a homeless safe house, a woman across town is a local university researcher, looking into the Antarctic ozone layer. We learn to use the resources and spaces already in the community. We learn to start meeting up, in what we have.
One great advantage to this is that now school becomes life. Learning is considered natural again and life-long learning is embraced. Just in time learning redirects energy, time, space, and most of all people.

In the US, when you say real life people tend to define it as: outside of school. – Michael Wesch, K-State

Who’s together in a room or space becomes a per choice proposition.
Today, people are learning online, on boats, in buses, in classrooms, in schools of all sorts, in other countries, at home, in the city, … this is great. What we are suggesting is that we no longer pigeon-hole learners to any of these spaces. You want to learn on a boat. Great. But let’s not say now, that you are a boat learner only. Change is good. Learning is change, is innovation.
A more liberating question (or test or evaluation if you must) we could be asking each other, might simply assume learning from living, and pose more curiosity in where, when, how, what and with whom it happened.

The time, money, and people we currently spend on classroom management and policy is no longer needed. Imagine if we offer exposure over compulsion and facilitate connections (virtual and local) to gatherings that matter.

Once we understand that learning can and should occur outside the classroom, it will become commonplace to see students engaged in learning activities throughout the community. – Stephen Downes

The original MOOCs [Massive Open Online Courses] model this disruptive space/learning online incredibly well. It’s open, participatory, distributed, and supports life-long learning. It’s an event, that people gather around, per choice.

The be you house models a vision of the city, eclectic and accessible. A city google sketch up will enable co-creation of spaces, as we crowdsource communities of practice. People drawn to these, free up existing school spaces, so we can restructure them toward more permission and delight.
Perhaps a better way to spend ourselves than current plans to simply manage people.