| D O O R S O F P E R C E P T I O N 5 | |
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Breaking contrains and construct our own learningscapes |
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| Hilel Weintraub |
Nobuyuki Ueda |
| Nobuyuki Ueda Hilel Weintraub NOBUYUKI UEDA : Good morning. We came to this great place all the way from Japan. I feel like I want to sing. What do you think? HILEL WEINTRAUB : Well I'm not ready to sing. How about dancing? Are you ready to dance? NOBUYUKI UEDA : What can we do, something together? HILEL WEINTRAUB : Yeah, I think we need to change the environment a little bit. One of the things that you and I do as designers of learning spaces is we like to redefine the constrains and look at the space and the time and try to find a way to break those constrains. NOBUYUKI UEDA : Yeah! HILEL WEINTRAUB : It gives us a chance to think about things in a new way. NOBUYUKI UEDA : Yes, and we like to change this moment and this place to a playful environment. And we'd like to see a great 'learningscape'. We can construct our own learningscape here. HILEL WEINTRAUB : This is a conference on play but why not make it a playful conference? So breaking constraints, engaging ourselves and being involved in the cool construction of knowledge together, right? Well see, we've been listening but it's time to create our own knowledge together. That's what we'll try to do. NOBUYUKI UEDA :Yeah! For that reason we brought this wire (ed: pipe cleaners and small cushions were placed on all auditorium seats). And we brought thousands, but maybe that's not enough. HILEL WEINTRAUB : Not enough. NOBUYUKI UEDA: I'm going to deliver the rest while you go and explain it. HILEL WEINTRAUB: We wanted to show you how wired we are in Japan. Japan is a very wired country so what we're gonna do is this little exercise. I want you to take your wire - so if you already have constructed something, you have to deconstruct it. We want you on your left finger, to create a ring. And create it, just loosely so you can take it off, because you're gonna have to take it off later. This ring is an engagement ring. It's a sign of being engaged with our own knowledge. So after you make this little shape, this little ring shape, we want you to construct your own personal theory of play. Okay … you got it. So using these two wires you can construct your own image, your own ideas about play. NOBUYUKI UEDA: Your theory of play or your vision of play or your feeling about play - anything. HILEL WEINTRAUB: Okay, we're gonna give you a minute to construct this. Probably you're doing a better job if your taking it off your finger while you construct it, okay? NOBUYUKI UEDA: We're gonna have some great music and when the music stops, you stop. HILEL WEINTRAUB: We'd like you to be engaged, right? So when you're done with your engagement ring, I'd like you to put it on your finger and just hold up your hand like this and we'll know how many people are done with their ring. We're getting there. Okay. Now what we'd like you to do is turn to your neighbour and explain you personal theory of play, to your neighbour. HILEL WEINTRAUB: Next step. We'd like you to take your ring off your finger now. And you've had a little chance to explain it to make your theory external, to externalise your ideas and get a little feedback. We'd like you to look at your theory again with new eyes and see whether you want to de-bug it or de-bug your explanation a little bit. Make some change in your drawing or what else? NOBUYUKI UEDA: anything. HILEL WEINTRAUB: Any changes in either your explanation or your creation. NOBUYUKI UEDA: So think about how you de-bug your explanation, your shape. Start. HILEL WEINTRAUB: Okay, We're gonna change the method a little bit. What I want you to do now to further your engagement is I'd like you to ... Put your ring on your left hand. And we want you hold hands. Oh you've got yours on your little finger - that makes it interesting. We want you to touch each other somehow - your partner - and talk with a new person talk about your theory a second time. NOBUYUKI UEDA: Can you stand up and look for the person who have not talked. You touch other persons hands please. It's very important. Girl on stage: It's like the game where you cannot touch Boy on stage: It's like the electrical spiral. Girl: It's electricity. We tried it with each other but it's kind of hard. NOBUYUKI UEDA: Oh that's great. Okay thank you very much. NOBUYUKI UEDA: Could you come up here and I want you to take a look at this scene. What's going on here? It's kind of an interactive environment. You can see it. Boy on stage: How do I say it? NOBUYUKI UEDA: Just your impression about this learningscape, as I call it. Boy o.s.: It's much more fun. It's more awake. Everyone is enjoying themselves. NOBUYUKI UEDA: How are you thinking about looking from a little higher place? To see the meta-level. You are now watching the people. On the second floor - this is like the second floor. You can see what you're really doing. So that's a point: sometimes you can climb up to see and go into the activity again. NOBUYUKI UEDA: Okay, thank you everybody. We'd love to continue this for an hour but we have a time constraint, so lastly could you talk about your experience, about doing this? All right, this time you talk about your own experience. HILEL WEINTRAUB: I noticed that people were starting to throw pillows. This is something else we were gonna do. This is part of our presentation. How did you guys know? You know Nobuyuki and I were going to have people write messages on these pillows and toss them in the air. NOBUYUKI UEDA: Okay thank you, please sit down, thank you very much. HILEL WEINTRAUB: Could you two guys come up on stage? NOBUYUKI UEDA: Okay please stop and sit. HILEL WEINTRAUB: Too playful. There's no message on this, it just says: Play. NOBUYUKI UEDA: we are very happy to be interactive. HILEL WEINTRAUB: and to be part of this playful environment. NOBUYUKI UEDA: Last part is a very important part. We ask students all the time to reflect back of their own experiences. So I want you to talk about your own experience. What just happened right now? Boy on stage: We talked about a lot of the theories of play and the one that seemed to come a lot from me and the others is that it's something quite flexible and we don't want to put any boundaries on it because then it becomes too formalised and it loses a lot of the essential elements. NOBUYUKI UEDA: So maybe your experience about this project Boy 2; this one project? We talked yesterday about 'play is doing'. And I think the doing is definitely the part of it. It's all about learning. So do it. It's like.... NOBUYUKI UEDA: Okay, we want to continue doing this but we like to explain and introduce what we're doing in Japan. In Japan we have lots of projects on learning and computers. But one piteous thing is that people are paying too much attention to computers. How we operate a computer, how do we access Internet? And people are not talking very much about how we redefine learning, how we redefine the role of media. So that's why I started Code Multimedia Unplugged. I got a little bit angry because so many people were just talking about computers. So I ask them to unplug the computer from the wall and think for a while about the essence of learning or the role of media. So this is my small museum in Japan. The reason I created it is as kind of a proposed new generation museum; no objects inside, but great people and interaction, and great ideas. These are new concepts about museums - or we could call it an atelier. And I'm teaching in a women's university, teaching about 4,500 women students. At weekends we spend about 30 minutes for this kind of workshop and how I do the workshop is first, I don't prepare everything. We start to prepare the material you use in the workshop. Perhaps making t-shirts, and by making t-shirts together we can develop the kind of feeling of sensible community, of community practice. Sometimes we have a guest from the States and ask them to watch and do the research together. And thus we made Multimedia Unplugged. Now I'm kind to talk about physical space. You can see we have a second floor, a balcony, and the first floor is the activity places. And this is the workshop where we think about the role of media. We collected a lot of different types of media, tangible media, style forms. And we put in something about a theme for the graduate and undergraduate students. We'd like to talk about how we designed the environment. The first floor we call the experience level, and when you get stuck in the activity you have to go upstairs to a transformational zone, and when you got worked out, you go up to a reflection level. So we use a physical metaphor of mental processes and it's very important to go up, to reflect back on what you have been doing. and also prepare a kind of concept. These are my prepared concepts in an English form. If I use a Japanese word, it's very natural and better in everyday life. So we wanted to use these keywords as an object of thinking. So that's like a playful learning environment, convivial tools - something like that. This is a lunch box, which is very familiar. We use the box like this. And we asked the students to put a lot of ideas about theory of learning, theory of design. And we meet here. So a student can draw a lot of ideas here and de-bug it and bring that to the other person and talk about it and rethink about it, just as you have been doing with the ring things. So this is kind of an example of multimedia unplugged. I have been doing a lot of other unplugged things, but I think I've run out of time. HILLELL WEINTRAUB: I'd like to talk a little bit about the space that I've been involved in creating over the last five years. It's a new centre that has opened in Japan. And it's important for you to be aware of the context of Japan and the particular context of our school. So I'll show you a little bit of the students that I'm working with and then some of the activities that we do and the way we're trying to redesign the mood and the relationship in this new centre. This video is a collaboration between myself and my students, so it's of interesting quality. Space is a place to play with. This is where you enter into our communication centre, as it's called. And we get to meet some of my students who come from all over the world. So this is the new centre that we designed, trying to make it very bright and playful place where students can do all kinds of activities, and use all kinds of media seamlessly without thinking this is a computer center or this is a library. We have notebooks available for all the students. This is a student presentation. He's talking about the history of Origami and when he went to England, Origami was his way of identifying, being with Japanese. These are two students who are comparing Japanese sign language and American sign language, giving a presentation to their classmates. Everybody's practicing together and then trying out a phrase; we had some visitors that day, and asked them: 'where are you from?' We had puzzles, all kinds of different activities to engage the minds of our students working together, doing artwork. It's a space where students can collaborate and enjoy learning. This is a really very big step in Japan. She's looking at books that were done by other students. We're trying to teach people that they themselves are very important media, and how they might present their ideas to each other. So here's a student presentation about drugs, using all kinds of media in a very informal atmosphere. So we really hope that this is a kind of new way to relate to media and relate to each other. I think we can wind things up a little bit. Well, the exercise that we did together is a very important one. We have to stop in a minute, but what we want you to do is wear your ring outside during lunch. Talk to each other a little bit about your personal theories of play. De-bug your theories and rethink them and use this as a kind of media to extend your ideas and construct your ideas further. NOBUYUKI UEDA: And of course we like you to re-plug in the computer too, once you really feel what the role of new media is, once you feel your new conception of learning. So go back to the computer and use it. So now we're unplugging and unplugged and replugged. That's our message and our role or goal is to support children to become learning designers who can design their own learning with a collaboration: with others and with information technology. This is a key concept we carried all the way from Japan on education for the 21st century. |
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url: DOORS OF PERCEPTION |
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