Agency


Each of the major developments in the internet - from the client-server model to platform-based interoperability to web3-based consensus networks - has been accompanied by a shift in agency. The relative standing of the individual with respect to community, institutions, and governments was shifted, for better or worse.

Activities

2018/12/18 12:00 Conversation with Silvia Baldiris and Jutta Treviranus

Synopsis

Each of the major developments in the internet - from the client-server model to platform-based interoperability to web3-based consensus networks - has been accompanied by a shift in agency. The relative standing of the individual with respect to community, institutions, and governments was shifted, for better or worse.

Each stage in technological development is inspired by social, political and economic aspirations, and understanding the next generation of learning and technology requires understanding the forces that shaped them. So we close our enquiry with a consideration of issues related to power and control, to peace and prosperity, to hopes and dreams.

McLuhan said that technology is a projection of ourselves into the community, so we need to consider how human capacities are advanced and amplified in a distributed and interconnected learning environment. Our senses are amplified by virtual and augmented reality, our cognitive capacities extended by machine vision and artificial intelligence, and our economic and social agency is represented by our bots and agents.

We are the content - the content is us. This includes all aspects of us. How do we ensure that what we project to the world is what we want to project, both as teachers and learners? As content and media become more sophisticated and more autonomous, how do we bind these to our personal cultural and ethical frameworks we want to preserve and protect?

These are tied to four key elements of the new technological framework: security, identity, voice and opportunity. What we learn, and what makes learning successful, depends on why we learn. These in turn are determined by these four elements, and these four elements are in turn the elements that consensus-based decentralized communities are designed to augment.

Learning therefore demands more than just the transmission or creation of knowledge - it requires the development of a capacity to define and instantiate each of these four elements for ourselves. Our tools for learning will need to emphasize and promote individual agency as much as they need to develop the tools and capacities needed to support social, ;political and economic development.

It is difficult to imagine a world in which education is not solely about knowledge and skills. But as we transform our understanding of learners from social and economic units to fully realized developers and sustainers of the community as a whole, it becomes clear that education must focus on the tools and capacities for agency along with the knowledge, culture and skills that sustain them.

Tasks

Media

Conversation with Silvia Baldiris and Jutta Treviranus Dec 18, 2018 video For the last week of Learning 3.0 we had a conversation with Silvia Baldiri, who works with the Fundación Universitaria Tecnológico Comfenalco (Colombia) and Universidad Internacional de la Rioja (Spain), and Jutta Treviranus, Director of the Inclusive Design Research Centre (IDRC) and professor at OCAD University in Toronto. We talked about inclusive design, agency and the Social Justice Repair Kit.


What Peace Means to Me Dec 20, 2018 video The only path toward peace and freedom from authoritarianism is the path that leads toward the creation and maintenance of the civil society. The just society. The caring society.

Resources

The Three Dimensions of Inclusive Design
GitHub, 2018/12/18

The three dimensions of the framework are:

  1. Recognize, respect, and design for human uniqueness and variability.

  2. Use inclusive, open & transparent processes, and co-design with people who have a diversity of perspectives, including people that can't use or have difficulty using the current designs.

  3. Realize that you are designing in a complex adaptive system.

You can edit this work on GitHub.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Social Justice Repair Kit
Inclusive Design Research Centre, 2018/12/18

The goal of the Social Justice Repair Kit project is to support youth at risk who have learning differences to re-engage in education through an inclusively designed social justice platform that integrates authentic project-based learning. For youth with identified and unidentified learning differences, the Kit will add inclusive design supports to remove barriers to participation.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Contando el valor de la diversidad!
Cuentalo, 2018/12/18

These stories serve as a reference to other people who identify themselves in them and who discover in them similarities with their own life story, which in some cases may turn out to be unfavorable, however, in this discovery, possible methods of coping are identified that allow resolving or resignifying adverse situations optimistically.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers
u Hong, Scott E. Page, PNAS, 2018/12/18

"We find that when selecting a problem-solving team from a diverse population of intelligent agents, a team of randomly selected agents outperforms a team comprised of the best-performing agents." See also Problem Solving by Heterogeneous Agents, by the same authors.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Posts

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