NLab: Amplified Individuals & Business Resilience

Last year I was fortunate to be invited to speak at the Nlab Social Networking Conference at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK. The day focused on discussing the implications of Web 2.0 tools and applications and social networking for small business.  It was a great event, in part due to the wonderful hospitality of the folks at the University and the Institute of Creative Technologies, but also because we tried to bridge big ideas and concepts with the practical challenges of managing small business.

This year, my colleague Sue Thomas, Professor at DeMotfort University,  invited me to prepare a short video for their NLab event, Amplified Individuals and Business Resilience.  I was sorry not to be there, but at least I got to share some ideas, via video, of the opportunities for using participatory digital media to infuse communities and business with resilience – the capacity to reorganize and recover from crisis – to meet the challenges of a complex and uncertain world.

Here is a link to a page with the video and other audio clips from participants in the seminar.

What is most inspiring to me about this topic is the opportunity for local organizations to gain a bit more agency,  in the creation of information and the discussion around that information, in the ability to create more transparency in local processes and decisions, and in the ability to create, share, and direct resources.

I See What You Mean!

Early in my career I was fortunate to be exposed to the work of David Sibbet of The Grove Consultants International, a pioneer in visual thinking and using graphic language, templates, and “panoramic visualization” to create systemic change for organizations.   A phrase that has stuck with me from my experiences working with the Grove is the powerful “I see what you mean!”  All of a sudden, from a wall chart full of imagery generated by a group – icons, selected words, squiggly arrows, and colors – the complex rationale for a redirection in strategy or the seeds of a new vision would emerge.  I see what you mean!

As we enter a time in which we create abundant data streams (zillionics according to Kevin Kelly) and leave data trails about ourselves and our world with every Tweet, blog post, camera phone, mobile sensors, wiki, etc., the need for visualization to understand this data layer of our lives is critical.  We need to be able to see the meaning in the multitude of data and information.   New approaches to sense making and pattern recognition, and the development of visual literacy, will be increasingly important for navigating the data abundant world and for designing useful tools, services, and institutions.  Our children will need to be able to interact, create, and discover meaning in this quantified and data prolific world.

Larry Myatt describes the opportunities,and implications, for visual thinking and visual literacy in his article Connecting the Dots: The Unexplored Promise of Visual Literacy in American Classrooms from the The Forum for Education and Democracy. I particularly like this part, but read the whole article.

Among those making sense of these issues is Kristina Lamour-Sansone, founder of The Design Education Consultancy, whose commitment to bringing highly-challenging and disciplined graphic design values and applications into classrooms in a number of cities has shown exceptional promise. … Her visual-literacy approach captures the energy and vitality needed to liberate learning for those youngsters least likely to succeed in passing through the ever-shrinking “eye of the needle” of text-driven instruction. Lamour-Sansone works with teachers eager to plan lessons that turn students loose on their machines and in their mind’s eyes, to design complicated, eye-catching visual arrays that reveal sophisticated reasoning and high levels of intellectual engagement. These organic “maps” that interweave concepts, skills, connections, and comparisons are then deconstructed and converted back into thoughtful, highly organized outlines and drafts for use in chapter summaries, research papers, essays and portfolio artifacts.

What if you can’t go to school?

This article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle, Bay Area Schools Reconsider Swine Flu Closures,  is a good example of the importance of developing a resilient public learning system.

“Federal health officials are considering whether to stop recommending closure of schools where students test positive for swine flu, a move that could unburden parents from Brentwood to San Jose who are scrambling to provide last-minute child care.”

The article describes the burden placed on families to provide care for their kids while their parents work and schools remain closed for as much as two weeks.  Some parents think the decision is appropriate, while others think it is an over reaction.  Parents with strong social networks (as the family pictured in the article) were able to develop “cooperative” child care arrangements, a sort of rotating play date to cover the days while school is closed and parents work.  Those parents without such a social network have had to cope themselves (like the single mom described in the article).

As a working mother, I recognize the child care concern expressed in the article, but this is about much more than flexible child care.  What happens if our kids can’t go to their school for long periods at a time?  How do we flexibly provide consistency and quality in kids’ learning experiences as we respond to a variety of system shocks  (pandemics, climate change, extreme weather, energy shortages, etc) that we are likely to face in the future? What happens when we concentrate the learning experience to one mode or format – in this case a bricks and mortar school?

What is exciting is that we have an emerging set of digital media tools & applications (from mobile phones to Twitter to wikis) and new collaborative and cooperative social forms (like smart mobs, swarms, MeetUps, avatars and gaming guilds) that can help us create flexible ways to organize and coordinate learning experiences. How can these tools and social forms help us reconfigure and reorganize learning in response to big disruptions?  How can parents and educators develop and leverage a “smart education grid” comprised of distributed resources (digital, human, curricular) and diverse modes of learning?

What if instead of the progressive childcare described in the article:

“Today, Jack Macy has to go back to his job coordinating recycling programs for the city of San Francisco, so the girls are headed for classmate Kiki Valenzuela’s house. A babysitter has been hired for the Wednesday shift, then it’s on to Caroline’s house, and, on Friday, Rachel Aronson’s house.”

the giggly second graders got to continue with their reading and writing through a neighbor to neighbor literacy volunteer program that got alerted through Twitter when the school closures were decided, or worked on their math puzzles posted their work on the math class wiki for their teacher to review and comment on, and then discussed it on the phone, or a webconference, (like Elluminate).  There are many options to think about for reorgnizing learning in a more bottom up way, and I think we will see it coming from creative parents, classrooms, and educators who want more than a “school is open or closed” world.

We need to move from thinking about email and cell phones as a way to arrange on the fly play dates and coordinate summer camp schedules, to thinking about how we can use the full range of mobile, participatory, and collaborative media to create a new resilient public learning infrastructure.

Resilience: Enabling New Patterns, New Agency

I’ve been reading with great interest the posts of John Robb and Jamais Cascio related to resilience. Both make the case persuasively that in a world of black swans, global system shocks and instability, resilience (in communities, institutions, systems) is necessary not only to remain viable, but to thrive.

Jamais offers a clear definition of resilience:  the capacity of an entity–such as a person, an 
institution, or a system–to withstand sudden, unexpected shocks, 
and (ideally) to be capable of recovering quickly afterwards.

I’d like to extend the idea of “recovery” a bit.

I find the significance of the concept of resilience in its adaptive and transformative power—in its dynamic to generate novelty during crisis.  Resilient systems, communities, organizations recover by reorganizing, and possibly even transforming.  (John Robb’s reference to the T-1000 reassembling (through scale invariance) to continue to attack the Terminator is a nice visual of this.)

Fritjov Capra (The Web of Life) argues that a property of all living systems is their capacity to generate new patterns during times of critical instability. Brian Walker et. al., writing in Ecology & Society, emphasize adaptability and transformability as important related attributes of resilience.  They describe resilience as the “capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change” (italics mine).  Sometimes the system transforms.  It creates “untried beginnings from which to evolve a new way of living when existing ecological, economic, or social structures become untenable.” They give an example of the transformation of a rangeland ecosystem from many cattle ranches to a few conservancies managed collectively for ecotourism.

For communities, having the capacity to reorganize and transform to a more viable system seems to be critical for long-term success.  Community resilience is an adaptive practice, enabled by generative capacities to sense, learn, create, and re-organize.  These capacities will support a community’s efforts to generate novel solutions that maintain its distinct identity and wellbeing as it is connected to the global system and subject to global forces.

I think four trends are converging to drive a creative explosion of ways that communities can develop resilience–their capacity to reorganize and generate novel solutions and strategies:

•    Amplification of sensing and cognition through participatory digital media.  New digital media, from camera phones and sensors to social media such as Twitter and wikis are enabling people to create, filter and track data streams more effectively as well as make sense of it.  Citizen science projects, for example, use mobile sensors to amplify a community’s ability to capture environmental data.  Data visualization applications and collaborative gaming are ways to make sense of vast amounts of data.  This amplified capacity could help detect system threshold points (like its getting too big, or too polluted, or too leveraged).  This could help avoid system failures and recognize them more quickly when they do happen.

•    Super empowered groups as a modular social infrastructure.  The ease of affiliation and group formation has increased tremendously with social media. I see this trend as an intersection of Clay Shirky’s ideas in “Here Comes Everyone: The Power of Organizing without Organizations” and David Reed’s point that group forming networks grow exponentially and can rapidly scale as members co-create their own value.   Communities now can grow very user-centric social infrastructures to catalyze collective action and cooperation around issues and needs that matter to them.  The Transition Towns movement exemplifies this as self-organizing groups in communities across the world have quickly adopted Transition Culture ideas and have started to act collectively in their own meaningful ways.  The Interra Community Change Card (a shop local project) shows how social networks comprised of merchants, producers, and residents can boost local economies.

•    Democratized fabrication and the emergence of community-based micro-economies.   Efforts such as TechShop and MIT’s mobile FabLab program have the potential to transform the productive capacity of communities.  Equipped with 3D printers and computer controlled machine tools, these open fabrication centers amplify the capacity of communities to design, prototype, and fabricate stuff – objects, parts, components.  Community members and local organizations like senior centers or schools, and local artisans can create their own micro economies, repair networks, and production webs.  South Bronx residents used the FabLab tools to make furniture and irrigation pipes.

•    The rise of know-how networks and exchange of practical knowledge.  Opportunities to share, and learn from, practical knowledge is unleashing DIY behaviors and creative capacity in various domains.  Local expertise can attain global recognition and support and local organizations can reap the benefit of others’ experience, experimentation, and insight. Some key areas of growth are: artisan networks that share how-to knowledge and instructions like Instructables; open educational resource networks that exchange curriculum methods and lessons such as Curriki and OER Commons;  and R&D and design networks.

Together these four trends can enhance the resilience of individual communities through flexible platforms in various domains (education, food, health, finance) and could begin to create an interconnected web of pioneering communities with increased local agency and more suited to the volatility of the global system.

NOTE: I will be exploring more of these ideas in an upcoming paper published by the online journal of the Institute of Creative Technologies.

Altered Bodies

Rob Mitchum has a nice article in SeedMagazine.com, “This is your brain on Facebook”,  that puts recent concerns (doomsaying) about the relationship between the Internet and our brains into a more informed context.  He points to the latest research from UCLA and University of Rochester that focuses on the links between digital media and brain plasticity and the implications for therapeutic and educational applications. He suggests that research reveals “more benefits than ill consequences” but acknolwedges that this is an open research question.

As Gary Small of UCLA states:

“We tend to oversimplify when we argue whether technology is making us smart or making us stupid,” Small says. “The brain is complex and technology is complex; it’s the content, timing, and balance of what we’re doing that’s important. We can argue whatever we want with so little data. It’s not settled; we need to study it. These are the technologies that are part of our lives, so we need to be scientific about it and not conclude from the outset whether it’s all good or all bad. We need to understand it and use it in a way to enhance our lives.”

The complex challenge of understanding the relationship between the environment — technological, urban, ecological — and our human performance is an important driver of change when thinking about communities, schools, and learning envronments.  As our knowledge in this area grows, hopefully we can begin to design and implement interventions to mediate damaging effects and design more brain and body healthy environments for teachers, learners, and families.

How we alter our bodies and brains and the implications for how we think about performance is one of the drivers of change in KnowledgeWorks’ 2020Forecast.

“Advances in neuroscience are revealing new understanding of the brain, its plasticity, and its responsiveness to the environment. Emerging notions of neuro-diversity and physical “disability” will challenge standards of what is “normal” and will spark innovations that help mainstream populations. At the same time, greater threats to human and environmental health from climate change, pollution, war, extreme urbanization, and other natural and human-made disasters will in the next decade create new stresses on minds and bodies. These stresses will converge in schools, some of which will seek to instill a sense of stewardship for self and environment in their students. With their mission to educate all students, these schools will become key sites for interventions to overcome the various challenges of disability and bio-distress and their impacts on learning.”

See Altered Bodies for more.

Interview: Creating a World of Learning

Yesterday Steve Hargadon interviewed Chad Wick, founding President and CEO of the KnowledgeWorks Foundation, and me about the new 2020 Forecast.

The interview was conducted in Elluminate, a great collaborative environment,  and you can listen to just the audio or the full elluminate recording (there were two visuals that we shared – an overview of the map and the interactive map website).

Reflecting on our interview, one of the big stories from the map for me is how we are shifting from a mental model of education as the institution of schooling to a mental model of teaching and learning as a lifestyle of creation and collaboration.  This shift reminds me of the change we have seen in the healthcare industry.  Over the past decade we have seen healthcare shift from a focus on hospitals and acute care to an active focus on wellness and creating a healthy lifestyle.  Health has become a filter for many individual and family decisions with a diverse ecology of services, providers, and individual practices emerging to address this broad wellness focus.  So with education, the focus is shifting to learning, creativity, personal growth and development, and personal relevance and meaning.  Access to opportunities for cultivating and nurturing a “learning lifestyle” is gaining ground as a way to think about the future of education.

The good news is that there is an abundance of experimentation in ways to organize teaching and learning and develop a diverse educational ecology: from amplified classrooms like the Flat Classroom Project to alternate reality gaming, to eco-schools who create the basis for resilient school-communities.  My hope is that we see an ambitious innovation agenda in alternative public systems ( or ecosystems) for teaching and learning so that we can support a diverse world of learning.

Creating the Future of Learning

The KnowledgeWorks Foundation recently released its new 2020 Forecast: Creating the Future of Learning.  This is an important resource for anyone interested in the strategically thinking about transforming the public systems and structures to enable a new world of learning.

As Monica Martinez, VP for Education Strategy, writes, “the world calls not for better schools, but for entirely new kinds of learning environments.”

The forecast focuses on six disruptive drivers of change and their implications for new challenges and opportunities for re-imagining and recreating how we move from a world of “schooling” to a world of “learning”.  I had the privilege of collaborating with KWF on this forecast (and their 2006 forecast) as research director and continue to track these areas (in this blog and elsewhere).

In addition to the forecast itself, KWF offers ways to engage with the forecast material and to take action through various kinds of workshops, policy briefs, group presentations, and even tips for personal action.  This is a terrific resource that I’ll likely be referring to in future posts.

Welcome to Andrea Saveri’s blog

I’ll be sharing research, ideas, and projects related to amplification, cooperation, and resilience here. Specifically, I am interested in how we can amplify ourselves — as individuals, as members of communities, as decision-makers in institutions, and as a society — to become more resilient in an uncertain future.

New technologies and digital media can amplify our individual and collective human capacities to sense our world, create new insights, and build platforms that enable us to cooperate to regenerate our civic, economic, and political life. Cooperative strategies inform us about ways to interact to avoid social dilemmas that result in unsustainable and inequitable outcomes. Together, strategies for amplification and cooperation can help create systems that are more resilient — ones that adapt to crisis by absorbing shocks and learning, reorganizing, and generating new patterns for renewal and growth. I’ll be using this blog to explore what amplification, resilience, cooperation, and digital media hold for community life and civic discourse, alternative systems of education, innovation, local economies and micro production, and youth.