Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

4.13.11 | Teachers, administrators, spoken word artists, inventors, poets and a chef were among the speakers who shared their own “ideas worth spreading” at the TEDxSFED conference this weekend at SOMArts in San Francisco.

An off-shoot of the annual TED Conferences, which invites the world’s leading thinkers and doers to speak for 18 minutes and then makes the talks available, for free, at TED.com, TEDx invites local organizers to use the TED brand to create their own speaker series around local ideas. This one was organized by a team of local educational innovators around the theme “mashEDup: re-imagine education,” and as a result, the day had a great DIY feel.

Discussion focused around questions such as: What would it look like if we trust educators and students to be leaders in the movement to change teaching and learning? And: How can we use technology to help this shift happen?

One of my favorite presenters was graphic designer Sandy Speicher, who talked about the importance of encouraging kids to ask, “What if?” Speicher told the story of Andrew, a student who jumped seamlessly from designing a name tag for a peer to thinking about how to save the state of Michigan’s economy to improving the food in his own school’s cafeteria.

“Wouldn’t it be amazing if every kid in America could think this way?” she asked the crowd. And yet, she said, “This is clearly not being taught in our K-12 systems.”

Speicher also leads the design for learning group at the innovation and design firm IDEO. The firm, in addition to working on clean water projects in India and Africa, has been developing tools that use design principles like creative problem solving to help educators rethink education.

Given that “The job of a designer is to create new meaning,” Speicher said design can help students navigate the complexity of today’s world by teaching kids to create for it.

In order to prepare students to meet the complex challenges of the future, IDEO is working with schools to restructure curriculum so it’s more experiential, student-directed, collaborative and investigative, often involving digital tools. Speicher says students need to create solutions to problems on their own and to feel comfortable in the role of active seeker of information instead of just passive receiver of knowledge.

Later this month IDEO will be launching a toolkit for educators focusing on design thinking. Look for it at designthinkingforeducators.com.

Speicher said kids today need to adopt the notions “I am aware of the world around me, I believe I have a role in shaping that world, and I choose to take action toward a more desirable future.”

As we’ve covered before, Quest to Learn in New York, and the new Chicago Quest opening this fall, do just that. The schools’ curriculum and learning environments are grounded in the principles of video game design. [See “Should School be More Like Playing a Game?” and “Katie Salen on Game Design and Learning.”]

David Orphal from Skyline High School floated the idea of “teacherpreneur.” The idea that educators should be allowed to move more seamlessly from teacher to administrator to designer and back again would help ensure that classroom teachers had a greater voice in leadership and that policy leaders stay in touch with what’s going on in the classroom by spending time there.

“What would the educational landscape look like if we have teachers running ed policy?” Orphal asked. “What would educational reform look like if Secretary Arne Duncan took five weeks to teach summer school?”

Fewer tests and more room for project-based learning, collaboration, designing and exploring real-world problems was his answer. [MindShift’s Tina Barseghian has more on Orphal’s ideas in this blog post.]

Similarly, Dale Dougherty, co-founder of O’Reilly Media and creator of the popular Maker Faires, said the maker movement is also an opportunity for innovation.

“Making has this tremendous power to transform education,” Dougherty told the crowd, quoting the philosopher Jean Piaget who said: “To understand is to invent.”

“Making things isn’t just about hands-on activities,” Dougherty said. “It’s actually about how me make meaning, how we think and how we construct our world in new ways.” [See Spotlight’s “Re-Making Detroit” for more on the maker movement.]

Dougherty spoke with Tony DeRose, senior scientist at Pixar, about their new Young Makers Program, a collaboration among MAKE Magazine, The Exploratorium, and Pixar to encourage young innovators by providing kids with mentoring and opportunities to invent.

The hit of the day was the animatronic fire-breathing dragon brought along by several of the young makers themselves. Sam DeRose and Alex Jacobson built the dragon in their garage and finished it only hours before last year’s Maker Faire Bay Area, working late into the night.

To make the dragon, in addition to learning physical and mechanical design skills, as well as how to weld, the students learned new software and programming skills with Arduino, a microprocessor jet.

“It’s open source and you can build whatever you like on it,” Jacobson said, “including a fire-breathing dragon.”

All the presentations will be posted soon at tedxsfed.org. You can also view the social media follow-up and Twitter stream with the hashtag #tedxsfed for links to more coverage and discussion.