Category: Experimenting Communities

Let´s Entangle – On digital materialities in kindergartens

Let´s Entangle – On digital materialities in kindergartens

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HåndSengKredsIld

Hi, Frank. You have been an educator of social educators for years in Denmark. And you have always advocated and demonstrated that digital media easily can become part of everyday practice in kindergartens combining screen and floor, media and body – also on an european level (Støvelbæk & MediaPLAYINGcommunities 2009). Well, here is a term, that might support that: Digital Materialities.  It is defined like this, where “…the digital and the material are not separate but entangled elements of the same processes, activities and intentionalities.” (Pink, Ardèvol & Lanzeni 1:2016). The term is closely connected to the ideas of designing, making and intervening into the world, no matter is you are a designer, a maker or a researcher.

Paper & Screen

If a child and a pedagogue in a kindergarten together draw a drawing on a piece of paper and then takes a picture of this drawing with a mobile phone and uploads it on a social media for children and pedagogues in another kindergarten to see then you have in the very same process elements that are either digital or analogue. They can be separated but they belong together in the same cultural and pedagogical process with certain activities, exercises and experimenting while playing.

This small situation also points towards the entanglement of online and offline, synchronous and asynchronous. If you upload an image on a social media you might get a direct answer right away or you may not. If you are experimenting, narrating and playing on the floor, then you might use what somebody else has uploaded, as inspiration, challenge or support.  The image might be in your memory as you play or you go and consult the image from time to time on a screen. In both cases screen and floor are connected.

Green Screen

Here is another situation: Some children and the social educator Elisabeth Mathisen in the kindergarten The Hobbit in Denmark were using a green screen app to examine the effects in images and videos such an app could bring about (Thestrup & Mathisen 2018). They were using the app, the tablet, large quantities of green cloth and all other green objects, they could use. The images in this text, are from that project. Have fun guessing how they did it. (Yes it is a teaser for the video to come…)

When they wrapped themselves into a large piece of green cloth while being filmed and combined with an image on the tablet, they were entangling the digital and the material while playing using body, space and technology . They were even in a process where their entanglement led to new ways of using the green screen app that at least I did not expect.

So, let´s continue to entangle and make our common future through that.

Best Klaus

Bibliography

Pink, S. Ardèvol, E & Lanzeni, D. (ed.) (2016). Digital Materialities – Design and Anthropology: Bloomsbury

Støvelbæk, F. & MediaPLAYINGcommunities (2009). MPC is what you see: MediaPLAYINGCommunities, Video documentary, localized 18.02.2018 on https://youtu.be/GtGHo5oXuUY

Thestrup, K. & Mathisen, E. (2018). The Green Screen Experiments: Global Experiments. Video documentary made for educational purposes as part of the EU-project Mini-makers (http://mini-maker.de/en/). Exp. 2018

Inside the experimenting community

Inside the experimenting community

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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.