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.

Sunday quote: "Geeks are citizens too"

My colleague at Citilab, Chris Pinchen, was beaming after his intense days in Birmingham. There he attended an event sponsored by Digital Birmingham "Developing Digital Birmingham District". He presented Citilab as a possible component of a wider urban innovation strategy.

He poured on me a lot of impressions. He was radiating good vibes.  Got very positive appreciation from the people that attended the conference  (follow their conversations and QA on Twitter here and here) and explained me about how to reinforce some initial cooperation we are starting as well as many others that he was able to initiate while there. Then we started to review his presentation on SlideShare. It has a lot of humour. Specially about current (mis?)conceptions abroad on the relationship between Barcelona and innovation. Then I saw this slide:

which, Chris told me, started a round of applause among the attendants.

Which is understandable. There is a strong Birmingham civic activism that is led by tech-savvy citizens  I'll comment sometime in the future about several initiatives in Birmingham that illustrate perfectly well how and in which imaginative ways a critical mass of "geek citizens" can make a difference to the city's present and future.

In other words, I think some Birmingham examples will help me show some possible pathways to citizen-led innovation that couldn't happen at all without their knowledge of the digital culture.  It might also be that they took these steps because they thought as digital design thinkers, not just as digital wizards (which some of them definitely are!). This is what Citilab is all about: letting people innovate in whatever sphere they want by using the strategies, practices and tools of the digital world.

In a way, it is a matter of turning citizens into geeks, too.

And this parallelism is what we will explore further during UrbanLabs09. Don't forget that the motto for Urbanlabs  (a contribution of one of its founders, Enric Senabre)  is:

"Technocitizenship" (geeks with civic conscience and citizens with digital abilities)

and

"Socioinnovation"  (let technocitizens invent their collective future).

Sunday quote: What Picasso didn't know

Google's Gmail "quote of the day" bar surprised me with this some days ago:

Pablo Picasso - "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."

(click to see the ZKM video)

Picasso died in 1973.

It is unfortunate that he didn't see what became of computing after his death. Personal computing, graphic interfaces, the internet turned computing into something else than just answer-oriented number crunching. At that time, however, even his genius couldn't help him imagine computing's current possibilities or its pervasiveness, either.

More than number crunchers or gateways to information, computers are an excellent way to explore ideas, to get to know better what the problem that nags you really is. 

One way of doing that is by simulation, i.e., using computers to simulate what you don't understand. The other way is just by diving into programming to get deeper into your problem. In the process you start questioning yourself more and more.

My friend Jordi Delgado keeps on saying at every single change he has that programming is another way of inquiring. Basically you can start programming with a fuzzy idea of what your problem, you set out from an ill-defined problem, and in the process you get a better understanding of it, not just a closed answer. Talking with Jordi I found nice connections of this way of learning and inquiring with the ways of craftsmen, who explore knowledge while building objects. This is an aspect of computing that Alan Kay has championed for at least 30 years. It is extensively described in Howard Rheingold's  book "Tools for Thought". There he explored the goals and motivations of some not-so-well-known geniuses that anticipated in the 60s and 70s what Picasso couldn't see: Licklider, Engelbart and, again, Alan Kay.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/oaspetele_de_piatra/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Instead of giving answers, then, computers may help spark new questions.

So, it is important that when talking about "ICT Literacy" or "Computing Literacy" we think about this other way of looking at computers. These initiatives should be seen and devised as an effort to let people appropriate themselves of another big strategy for thinking and exploring creatively the problems they are concerned with.

However many people think otherwise, being as ignorant about computers as Picasso was in his time. They still look at computers as a means of getting asnwers either as a closed calculation or as the result of a search on the Internet.  They even take pride in appearing as ignorant about computers as Picasso, but without the excuse of not having seen what Picasso wasn't able to see (for the simple reason that he died before big things in computing and communications become more evident).  

Curiously enough Picasso also knew and practiced every single day of his life this other exploratory aspect. As he said:

I don't seek, I find.

Maybe he found more questions than answers when he did that. And started again from these new questions. One more time, his own words:

“Others have seen what is and asked why. (a side effect of a given answer?)

I have seen what could be and asked why not.”

Wouldn't be great to use computers to let ourselves keep asking "Why not?".