Inside the experimenting community
When the members of an experimenting community meet it is important to be able to transform whatever they meet outside the experimenting community itself. They might meet technologies, expressions, spaces, values, people and methods they don’t know or understand in advance.
So the ability to think, develop and act in transformation processes are important. They can be between different combinations of analogue and digital processes and material. They can be between construction of a technology and a narrative and what one is actually telling and communicating. They can be between the attempt to copy and repeat and the attempt to change and improvise.
The transformation has two sides: To make the members of any given community able to grasp the outside world and to make them aware, that they are in fact communicating. How can we possibly use what we se – and how can we show them what we think and feel.
The challenge and the answer might be to establish workplaces and laboratories, whose purpose it is to transform. Anything in these laboratories and workplaces are designed to play and experiment in ways that over time make sense for those involved. The experiments can go on in each singular physical space or between workspaces and laboratories involving productive digital tools.
2 Replies to “Inside the experimenting community”
In schools, where I work daily as a teacher, I believe that we have to make the children co-producers of learning. How to do that? I believe that we have to understand that children can teach each other – and the teachers – many things. Teachers are not longer the only one with knowledge. By using for example iPads in our digital teaching – and most important – to take a stand on what we can use it for in the classroom, we show the children that we all are a part of the same world. We have to talk the language the children are talking. Children today are not only copying the world around them, they are also changing it all the time. We can use this in the classroom. For more information about the iPad project in Odder I have been a part of: http://www.folkeskolen.dk/549258/ipaden-kan-goere-elever-til-producenter-af-laering-
When people meet something, that doesn’t make sense to them, they are likely to reject it. It has to do with a humanbeing as an autopoietic system- when we meet something that’s to unusual for us or our thinking we simply reject it. Maybe it also has to to with an anciet survivalmechanism… I don’t know…
But if it – in the experimenting community – is of great importance, that the members keep experimenting with and transforming the unknown until it makes sense to them (if I understand the post above correctly) , how do you work around the autopoiesis? Does it require a certain ability to ignore (or maybe suppress) unconscious psychological matters?
I’m asking my self if the experimenting community only is for the few?