Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

11.2.11 | Spotlight talks with executives from the Mozilla and MacArthur foundations about programs underway to connect cultural institutions with educational digital projects—and with each other.

With the help of the internet, learning has become more fluid and occurs in a more organic, networked way. Kids learn math and science in classrooms, and then pick up where they left off by following their interests online, accumulating a range of skills along the way. Yet that string of formal and informal learning is not yet well connected or integrated in any formal way. It lacks a center of gravity.

The Hive Learning Network NYC is working to change that. Hive NYC links educators of 30 cultural and learning institutions, helping them conceive and create programs that integrate their specialties—natural history, filmmaking, and art, to name a few— with creative, digital projects. The Hive Digital Media Learning Fund in the New York Community Trust makes grants every six months for new collaborative projects, which in turn seed richer connections among network members to exchange and share ideas and data. Twelve new grants totaling $590,000 will be announced today.

The Hive Learning Network (formerly known as New Youth City Learning Network) is not a screen-heavy replacement for what goes on in art museums or libraries. Rather, the network combines hands-on learning with digital media and the expertise of cultural leaders. The lessons educators and technologists learn from this experiment can eventually find their way into classrooms.

With Mozilla taking over the stewardship of the Hive as it moves beyond its early pilot stage, Spotlight talked with Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, Chris Lawrence, director of Hive NYC, and Connie Yowell, director of education at the MacArthur Foundation, about where the Hive is headed and how it can identify new directions for learning. 

Spotlight: The MacArthur Foundation funded the early pilot stage of the Learning Network, then called the New Youth City Learning Network. Why is it important that Mozilla steps in now?

Connie Yowell: We started the NYC Learning Network three years ago as a pilot project. It has progressively evolved to 30 members, and in the process has grown into a robust network. We felt it needed a full-time director who was committed to its growth and understands what it means to build a network of community, cultural, civic and education organizations that are focused on this approach, and that’s Chris [Lawrence].

We also felt we needed an institution on the ground who could be a partner with us and share our core values around learning, but who also really understands the web and development culture, and that’s Mozilla.

Mark Surman: Most tangibly, the Learning Network offers a way to immediately test innovations with learners and immediately adapt the software and the curriculum. We know innovation works well in those kinds of incubator contexts, and here we actually have this “garage” where we can work on learning products. And now we can do it with 30 other organizations that want to spread it around the world. People will take what we learn, adapt it and use it, and take it other places.

Spotlight: Why a network approach like this?

CY: We’ve learned in all our research with kids that learning happens in networks. It’s clear to us in the Digital Media and Learning initiative that learning in the future will not happen in siloed institutions. It will happen in networks. That’s why we started the Hive, and so who better to be the steward than an organization like Mozilla, which fundamentally understands the web and networks, and is joining us in reimagining learning.

Mozilla has a deep understanding of what it means to be a maker, creator and worker today. Their values in regard to what it means to be open and the role of the web in learning is consistent with our values of what the infrastructure for learning needs to be in the 21st century. Together, we can work in a coordinated way around the future of technology and the web, and the future of the next generation of learners.

Spotlight: It seems like a natural fit for the participating organizations to collaborate and to coordinate their learning opportunities. Why haven’t they been doing this already?

CY: Part of the reason they haven’t come together in a network is in part a funding issue. Organizations operate according to the way they are funded, and there aren’t funding streams that support networks. We as a foundation will continue to support these interactions across organizations.

The second thing is we haven’t had the kind of IT infrastructure in the nonprofit sector that would support a network that is easy to use. It’s been a heavy lift for organizations. We’re still providing support, and that’s why it’s important to partner with Mozilla, which can help them think through what the movement forward should be.

MS: Another reason, more fundamentally, is that these organizations operate in buildings. That sense of place is a powerful source of learning, but it also constrains one’s imagination because you don’t necessarily think about what happens as the learner moves to the next and next and next building.

Cities work as networks that weave together the individual buildings and the things that happen in them. So we’re turning up the volume on that networked way cities work, but in this case for learning.

CY: Yes. The web has allowed us to have a new imagination about what it means to work across place and have place take on a whole new meaning that is both physical and virtual. 

Chris Lawrence: Another reason why organizations haven’t been operating as networks is an audience question. The populace wasn’t as hungry and thirsty for it until recently. So the audience is driving this kind of collaboration, this understanding of the city as a larger learning space—the city as a game board. The trick now is to infuse that “city as game board” with some learning.

One of the Hive NYC organizations, Global Kids, is, for example, tapping into the online geocaching culture—a totally interest-driven, user-driven culture and community—to answer that question. They’re using geocaching to map the coming 2012 elections and civic engagement strategies with geocaching strategies. They’re using the city as game board but putting in some content that affects cities. The geocaching infrastructure is already there. The process is already on the phones. They’re just leveraging with a learning goal.

Spotlight: But isn’t this just adding another layer of complexity—a layer of technology, in this case? 

CL: To some, it might seem that we’re duplicating each organization’s efforts in a network like this. And there is that. But the Network also expands each organization’s reach and education space. Whether it’s kids out in Central Park with their mobile phones monitoring insects, or those kids pushing what they’ve discovered out online, it has an expansion base. It’s OK to say, yes, it does have duplication, but we’re putting a different pedagogical lens on that space.

MS: It’s also a new way of doing things. It’s not learning about technology. Technology is in the room, but it gives you a chance to shift and say, “What might I do differently?” It brings in that collaborative piece.

You’ve got kids out in Central Park collecting data but also thinking, “Hmm, how can I build something like this to collect my own data?” These are still kids who are turned on by science, but it’s changing how they engage with the science and also they way the think about technology.

CL: Also, an important secondary audience is the institutions and the professionals in those institutions. We’re hoping to empower them to be change agents by giving them the cohort, a space to share ideas and experiment, and then building collaborative projects.

So it’s not just the American Museum of Natural History doing what they do, but now they’ve pulled in other organizations, or they’re a secondary partner on someone else’s project. You might have youth interested in science, but, wow, is that more powerful when you integrate that with different fields, and show them how to do that in a collaborative sense.

Spotlight: At the center of the Hive is an open web culture. How do you define “open web culture,” and how does it fuel learning?

MS: For me, it’s this idea that you can take an idea in your head and go to the keyboard or pick up a camera, and make that idea happen. It’s easy to jump into this “maker” culture. You can easily collaborate with other people.

We know from the research that MacArthur has done that when you’re in this context with your friends or a community, and making something you’re excited about or interested in, that’s a context to pick up a broader set of skills—communication skills, web literacy skills, math, the list goes on. But they also need scaffolding to help them connect develop those skills. That’s where the educators in the Hive Learning Network come in. They know how to do learning well.

CL: What is powerful about the web as a learning opportunity is this idea that it isn’t that difficult to understand how the web is built or to quickly change an element on a web page. If our idea is to grow producers and makers in many contexts, then simply showing a person that he or she can change something quickly becomes a spark to reconfiguring their own sense of themselves as a builder and producer, and increases their confidence and competence.

Kids can create art or learn about history and not only broadcast what they learn via the web, but when they realize that they can create those mechanisms that push the content out—that they have a conceptual understanding about how things work in our lives—that’s a powerful spark.

Spotlight: Mark, you said on your blog that the Hive Network can “help a whole pile of other organizations who want to teach how we want to teach.” What does that mean?

MS: As we at Mozilla figure out that learning is a core pillar in how we want to keep the web a public resource, then we have to figure out how we want to do that. We want to do it like we make software—using a global, collaborative, community, approach.

Even at its simplest level, we looked at Hive NYC and others in MacArthur’s Digital Media and Learning community and saw people were already doing learning that feels like how we make software—and that feels like how the web gets made. We saw ourselves in this mirror, so who better to work with.

Spotlight: How can these networks, which are expanding to other cities as well, serve as incubators or “garages” where we tinker with ideas and innovate new solutions to learning—solutions that will eventually end up in classrooms?

CY: We’ve learned from designers and entrepreneurs that true innovation requires the opportunity to experiment and fail, and we need to have sites where it’s okay to fail fast, fail often enroute to developing breakthrough innovations in learning.  That’s hard to do in high-stakes environments like schools. So we want to make sure we have low-stakes environments where we can work together to develop and reimagine what learning can look like. And that’s what we see as one of the goals of the Learning Network.

That’s why we need a garage—this is the space where we should be looking for innovation to happen. We can then move the more tested innovations, once successful and where appropriate into schools.  This relieves schools of having to do all the risk-taking that comes with innovation and enables them to adopt approaches that have demonstrated some promising results.