Tinkering and education?
(crossposted from Eduinno12.blogspot.fi)
Tinkering
Task:
Go on Youtube and watch John Seely Browns -
Cultivating the Entrepreneurial Learner in the 21st Century -video. Then
write a blog post on eduinno12.blogspot.fi on how YOU would apply tinkering in
your learning. No set length, use as many or little words as you need. Title
your post "JSB - YOUR NAME" The video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoRV0BEwvEU
Reflections:
I was really impressed
by the talk. Thank you for bringing it into my attention. Bringing knowing,
playing and making together. This is something I underwrite in my own life. It
has been my philosophy – at least as far as more hands-on-knowledge is
concerned. But I still haven’t though of it as a parallel philosophy that could
be brought into learning.
When I began to learn
golf, I had to learn how to take apart, fix and tinker with the golf club. So I
regrip my own clubs. I’ve shortened a putter that was a tad too long. I’ve
grinded a little bit off a sand wedge that had too much bounce for my taste.
When I began to learn
photography, I had to learn how the devices function. So I took apart a lens to
see how it works. I had a compact camera with a broken shutter button. I didn’t
want to discard it so I tore it into pieces, and put in a new shutter button
for the eBay cost of $5. And then I took apart a flash. And I soldered a new
controller board inside the flash to upgrade some of its functionality. Once
you get to play, build, and learn with iPhone parts, you finally get very good
at repairing them, I can attest.
In all, it is very
easy for me to understand the logic behind this talk. In order to REALLY comprehend
– to OWN – a topic, you need to be able to play around it.
You could say the same
can happen in more conceptual issues as well. Like quantitative analysis.
Structural equation modeling (SEM) is based on difficult mathematics, at least
so difficult that I never understood it. But I still had to learn using it as a
statistical tool. Which you can do, using the statistical programs, which do
the math part for you. But it is a tinkerer analyst’s dream, so to speak. SEM
lets you play with the data. It lets you turn the data into a pipeline, or a
system of gates and paths, and play with it, to see what it turns into.
I haven’t had the joy
to teach any of the above subjects, but I still feel strongly that enabling
tinkering; play, making, and knowing, would be very beneficial in my teaching (which
are mostly business studies). I suppose it is what we are piloting in one of
our game based platforms right now. The LOL game allows for the students to
enter a virtual exchange world, where their ideas are the currency.
A game based business
platform lets students build a “company”, or a collection of assets. It lets
them play with ideas, solutions, and alternative ways of solving problems. It
allows for gathering knowledge, both for classic marketing topics, but also,
and probably more importantly, for gathering tacit knowledge about problem
solving. Like Mr. Brown talks, the tacit meta knowledge, the knowledge about
how to solve problems, is more important and more permanent that the static
knowledge about the solutions to a given problem.
In the end, I would
like to give my students the same feeling in their business studies that I have
with electronics. Even if what they first thought doesn’t work out, I want them
to feel in control. I want them to think, “hey, no worries, let me play with
this for a while, until I can get it to work”. Which brings back to mind
(sidetracking here), that I should write a blog post about my repair of a
failed Apple Time Capsule. It now works like a charm, although de-soldering the
original power supply and replacing it with an external Chinese import Cisco
power adaptor did take more time than I expected.
While tinkering is
what I have always believed in, it isn’t something that I have knowingly put
into my teaching. This is where I want to go in deeper.
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