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Slides form my talk at the conference "Rethinking Educational Ethnography: the learning context", Copenhagen 3.-4. june 2014 entitled: "Open Formations – Networked Thinking and Tinkering:Rethinking the People, Processes and Products of Learning Contexts as Open Formations" The talk outlines some of the central potentials of open formation courses, products, processes and organizational settings. Furthermore, inherent empowering, emancipatory and transformative potentials in allowing students to be self-reliant designers/researchers partaking in actual participatory academic communities through submitting research for actual conferences, intervening in and transforming actual learning contexts for themselves as well as for the subjects they design for and through being invited to showcase their didactic designs online and offline to international research communities are also sketched out. Moreover, the students’ (auto)ethnographic quests to break free of their professional practice (as teachers, pedagogues and practitioners of learning) to become adventurous designers/researches that set their own course and curriculum, take place through breaking out of institutional settings and into international research communities and operative learning contexts such as communal schools or museums are hinted at. In conclusion, the students ‘movemental’ journey towards becoming open formations through confidently taking their own places and paces within and across educational settings and learning contexts are adapted into a model for thinking abut digital technologies, learning processes, contexts, people and own professional practices as open formations.
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OPEN FORMATIONS: NETWORKED THINKING
AND TINKERING
Rethinking the people, processes and products of learning contexts as open
formations
Rikke Toft Nørgård, Assistant professor, PhD,Centre for Teaching Development and Digital Media,
Aarhus [email protected]
WHAT’S THE OPEN PAPER?
A work in progress
attempting to present students’ ethnographic processes [the course]
in order to perform an ethnographic analysis of these processes [the paper]
in order to develop a processual concept – open formations – that rethinks and opens up the people, processes and products of learning contexts [the outcome]
WHAT’S THE OPEN PERSPECTIVE?
The concept of open formations is an attempt to rethink the people, processes & products within learning contexts as ‘agents of change’
As unbound & unbridled by institutional settings/contexts – breaking out of courses setting their own course to find, take & make their own ‘unsafe’ spaces & places
As ‘unteachable’ empowered constructors of own participatory academic communities – being self-reliant by taking mattering into own hands and interacting in peer-communities
As ‘unstructured’ and ‘unsettling’ emancipatory, transformative forces making own pathways – crafting own networking and networked pathways across people, processes, products, communities outside the institutional territory
WHAT’S OPEN PARTICIPATION?Central challenges of being a learner in open
formations
Not any more simply students taking an online/offline course on didactic research/design using digital technologies
Being in charge of a process: DIY curriculum / practicum = so what do you need
to learn & do to matter?
Being a member of a community: contributing to online/offline academia = so how
do you participate to create real impact in communities?
Being a responsible, self-reliant subject: researcher/designer of actual research/design = so
how do you matter & make impact as a professional practitioner?
Being an agent of change in society: interventions/transformations of actual contexts =
so how do you impart affecting change in unbound learning contexts?
WHAT’S THE OPEN PRODUCTS?Constructing products-as-processes to meet posed
challenges
So what is important is not digital technologies/digital products/digital literacy/online communities in themselves
But the processes of developing knowledge, design thinking, ethnographic insights and analytical findings that flows as/through/across these products as open formations
= a radiant prism of resources, reflections, & result that allowed the groups – their thinking & tinkering – to take place as an open formation in the making
A united multiverse of products processes, practices, domains as vibrant entanglement
WHAT’S THE OPEN PRODUCTS?Products as interconnected networked/networking
processes
Moving through the city at night reflecting on things to come – using the ipad as conversational partner
Reflecting with participants about their experience of things just passed – using video to present and discuss this with others
Presenting own experiences as a piece of autoethnography – using Prezi to make pixi-books for future students and teachers
Building a curriculum together as a participatory academic community – using videoblogs and textblogs to present and discuss texts among each other
Merging processual products – videoblogs, prezi-narratives, mindmaps, scenarioes, academic portfolios and so on – into a conference paper to interact within online/offline participatory academic communities
Remixing processual products into a blog containing the variety and entanglement of processes across learning contexts and domains – binding the multifarious open products together and presenting them as an open processual formation to construct an ethnographic understanding to act designerly on
WHAT’S THE OPEN PRODUCTS?Products as interconnected networked/networking
processes
WHERE’S THE OPEN PLACE?
In this way a structure of entangled participation in networks constructed
a vibrant and fluctuating place of ’movemental’ belonging and taking place
not as a sedimentation into contexts, settings or structures but as a concerted movement ’across & beyond’ to make places of their own emerge amongst networked and networking online/offline communities
WHAT’S THE OPEN POTENTIALS 1?By viewing digital technologies as open formations we can
Move away from digital technologies as information containers / set tools for teaching/learning ’X’
Towards digital technologies as putting forward configurable invitations for interactions / experiences / relations / networks to take place
WHAT’S THE OPEN POTENTIALS 2?By viewing learning processes as open formations we can
Move away from learning towards set goals you design/teach for utilizing digital technologies
Towards learning as creating / construction participation in open formations supported by digital technologies
WHAT’S THE OPEN POTENTIALS 3?By viewing people in/and contexts as open formations we can
Move away from designing didactic structures & teaching as contained & controlled ‘creative’ products & contexts
Towards didactic design & teaching for ‘innovation’ as open invitations to intervene, move and mobilize people to take place and participate as networking and networked unbridled open formations
A place where practice, teaching & learning form, reform, rack and revolt into everchanging new formations
WHAT’S THE OPEN
PITTFALLS? Open formations processes:
gratification & emancipation or bewilderment & abandonment? Danger of giving privilege to certain learning and thinking styles
Open formation people: meaningfully emancipation in bloom or meaninglessly becoming beached? Danger of sacrificing one segment of students on the behalf of others
Open formations contexts: wonderful mattering or vicious maddening? Danger of making it too agoraphobic by letting go of responsibility and
structure
Open formations communities: powerful self-reliant students networking people, processes and products
or powerless students networked by people, processes and products Danger of uninformed and subdued participation just tagging along
WHAT’S THE (BULLET)POINT(S)?
Engaging the empowering, emancipatory and transformative potentials (& pitfalls) in rethinking people, processes and products in learning contexts as open formations
’Learning contexts’ happening everywhere as emerging formations in people, processes and products supported by digital technologies
Becoming ’an educated agent of change’ as the ability to thoughtfully navigate, interact, intervene in and transform networking and networked online/offline open formations (people, processes, products)
Participatory academic communites as open formations of self-reliant students taking place and being recognized as peers through their scholarly/designerly work supported by digital technologies
WHO ARE THE OPEN PEOPLE?Central multiplications opening up people in open
formations
Students accepting the invitation to be (treated as) peers in open formations researching/designing Multi-sited / multi-methodologically across ‘unbound
contexts’ Multi-fariously / multi-modally scholarly/designerly
‘products-as-processes’ Multi-layered / multi-level processes of ‘everywhere
formative learning’
in order to investigate actual learning contexts as actual
ethnographers present their research findings & results as actual
reseachers design actual contextual change as actual
intervening designers
Not any more simply students taking an online/offline course on didactic research/design using digital technologies
WHAT’S THE OPEN POTENTIALS 4?By viewing practices as open formations we can
Move away from viewing teaching/didactics as unchanging stipulated ‘best case’ practice
Towards teaching/didactics as an iterative reflective interventionist practice where practice form, reform, rack and revolt into everchanging new formations
