Technoculture(s)

Sunday Quotation "Digital fluency should mean..."

 

"Digital fluency" should mean designing, creating, and remixing, not just browsing, chatting, and interacting"

Mitchel Resnick

Mitchel Resnick develops in a recent article the rationale for designing the Scratch programming environment. As he stresses right from the beginning, this is a project aimed at developing digital fluency" at a deeper level than current approaches to teaching technology to kids. It tries to enrich the experience and abilities of children well beyond their typical behavior as "Digital natives".

The Scratch team goal was to create a programming environment that were:

- more tinkerable: i.e., extensible, adaptable, an environment where it is to try and try and try new ways of getting things done

- more meaningful, easy to relate to its users' goals, exploiting in the same environment programming, media and digital narratives so that users could express themselves and communicate through an environment that was first and foremost a programming environment. This is one of the keys of Scratch as it bridges the usually separated worlds of programming and media narratives (this is why game programming environments are also very powerful but usually lack the pedagogicla  and methodological orientation embodied by Scratch).

- more social than other programming environments: i.e., easy to share  your programs with other people and also to connect your projects with other projects. The worldwide Scratch community is really huge.

In their own words:

Since the public launch in May 2007, the Scratch Web site (http://scratch.mit.edu) has become a vibrant online community, with people sharing, discussing, and remixing one another's projects. Scratch has been called "the YouTube of interactive media." Each day, Scratchers from around the world upload more than 1,500 new projects to the site, with source code freely available for sharing and remixing. The site's collection of projects is wildly diverse, including video games, interactive newsletters, science simulations, virtual tours, birthday cards, animated dance contests, and interactive tutorials, all programmed in Scratch.

More interestingly:

It has become commonplace to refer to young people as "digital natives" due to their apparent fluency with digital technologies. Indeed, many young people are very comfortable sending text messages, playing online games, and browsing the Web. But does that really make them fluent with new technologies? Though they interact with digital media all the time, few are able to create their own games, animations, or simulations. It's as if they can "read" but not "write."

Which is something that Derrida and Stiegler almost said exactly word by word in discussing the current traits of digital culture and the "contributor culture" and how important it is for the majority of citizens to be able to "write" this new world.

Of course, here "writing" gets a stronger sense than blogging, creating wikis or else. It is in fact, "designing" and "building". That's the reason we chose Scratch at Citilab as the first environment into the digital world for kids. And that's why Jordi Deglado and his team  are currently very busy extending  it to connect it with a whole variety of robots, sensors and other devices. Because "building" involves also acting in the physical world. And connecting to a wider community of kids, parents and teachers.

Readers and writers. Users and designers?

When technologists and policy makers discuss about the interest of completely changing the way we are currently making technology known, I tend to stress the need for an active way of passing knowledge on to people. That is, to initiate processes that will result in active users, builders, designers not just mere passive user, receivers, consumers (link source in Spanish). 


(foto http://flickr.com/photos/jenwaller/)

This is why I was happy to come across this excerpt from a conversation between Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler. I hope their read/write analogy is enjoyed as a present by those who believe in active, practical, learning and skeptics alike. Let's see if it helps make understandable what we are after in places like Citilab. We walk with citizens along the path that leads into the kernel, the center of technology, of its code and what you can do when we you learn to write that code and to assess what it implies.  

In their set of interviews, philosophers Jacques Derrida and Bernard  Stiegler discuss how different kinds of media allow, more or less, certain  kinds of participation.

Their model is the alphabet, suggesting that “it  is hardly conceivable that the addressee of a book could successfully  read it without knowing how to write.”

Stiegler in particular anticipates that the increasing availability of video, audio and other software  will create a cultural politics in which people classically formatted as  receivers become agents of production. Derrida responds by differentiating between the ability to use something and knowing how it  works, a technical form of knowledge which he might be read to imply is superior.

(foto http://flickr.com/photos/joyoflife/)