New Normal 2021

How can we positively re-wire our future?

Since 1989 I’ve been mapping out possible green futures that might be shaped with emerging technologies by 2021. In 1989 I wrote a story outlining what this possible future might look like called Homi and the NeXT One which was also based on the core idea that we needed to develop participatory democracies to replace our corrupt, ineffective and environmentally damaging representative democracy.  On various occasions since then I’ve tried to flesh out some aspects of what that might mean, here are some of those ideas that might be worth considering in the new normal.

Heutagogy and Education; A key dimension in my work, as I’ve spent a lot of time in education working on digital learning systems (see #LearnTeach21), is the concept of Heutagogy. Coined by Stewart Hase in 2001 as “self-determined learning” I see this as also being about creative pedagogies of learning where we don’t believe in the educational mantra of “better living through taxonomy” and instead we try and develop everyone to their full creative potential, rather than restrict them to their earning potential. I run World Heutagogy Day every year and try and capture a new dimension in learning that year. We anticipated the current health crisis in 2017 calling for Health Participation Centres but Creativity in Learning 2016 is most informative.

Creativity In Learning from London Knowledge Lab

WikiQuals and Self-determined Accreditation; In 2011 I was involved with Occupy at UCL and they asked me to design an alternative Masters degree as they didn’t want to continue paying UCL for their education. As part of the weekend long “University Project’ in London September 2011 I workshopped an approach called WikiQuals, which Kate Faragher and many others have been working. I have many ways of implementing this but perhaps the best most clearly expressed in WikiQuals & Open Learning

WikiQuals and Open Learning from London Knowledge Lab

Solve the Problem That Annoys You Most; One of the principles we established as part of WikiQuals is that we should “solve the problem that annoys you most” (Philippa Young) and having run a workshop on WikiQuals at WikiMania 2014 I was then invited to expand this approach at the SenseCamp in Brussels. Perhaps this is particularly relevant as we now consider a possible post-Covid19 “new normal”

Build the Society that Pleases You from London Knowledge Lab

Changing Society by Learning Beyond the Classroom. in 2011 we set up a project MOSI-ALONG turning Manchester into an Ambient Learning City to learn how we could design “learning beyond the classroom. We kind of failed but learnt a lot especially two big things. Firstly everything we do is framed by existing metaphors that we leave unexamined. In designing “beyond the classroom” learning we needed to coin new metaphors of learning as Everything is a Metaphor. We then tried to consider what that might mean if we wished to be Designing Participatory Social Cities;

Participatory City from London Knowledge Lab

Third Places and City 2.0; I was part of an EU Erasmus+ project looking at new digital places that weren’t just “plug and play” but had many social characteristics that helped them make a broader difference to their community, called the Origin of Spaces. We worked with Bilbao, Bordeaux, Lisboa and Pula (Croatia) (#OOSEU) and I realised we were looking at a new form of Third Place enhanced with digital characteristics.

Third Place & ZAWP from London Knowledge Lab

Putting Context into Knowledge. However I think our biggest problem is our thinking. Or put another way our current (scientific) epistemology is itself both the source of our many current crises, especially the environmental one, but also precludes solutions because we value abstracted thought and “rationality” above all else; we have what I call “decontextualised” knowledge and we need to put context back into knowledge and learning the liberating values of ecological constraints;

Putting Context Into Knowledge from London Knowledge Lab

The Republic of Learning. Currently I am working on the idea of creating a Republic of Learning as a modern update of the Republic of Letters (the medieval Internet) that Erasmus began 500 years ago and I’ve been blogging about it on the Republic of Learning blog.

And Finally; I am also working on ideas relating to Policy 2.0  concerning participatory political policy making involving everyone (think of neighbourhood budgetting and “commons” approaches) and asked David Graeber to help set up a Participatory Papers project but he was too busy writing his book on democracy.

Fred Garnett 15 May 2020

Green My Learning

It was 30 years ago today

That I submitted my Masters Thesis on Green Paths to the Information Society 2021. It was rejected. I was told that I could not write a thesis on how to make the future better I could only document what had been done in the past. This is why Universities and the education system cannot solve the environmental crisis that we now face in the Anthropocene. So I dutifully paid fees for one extra year and rewrote it. Or rather I wrote a second, completely different, thesis entitled Is there a Green IT strategy? That was good enough for a University but there was no way that it might SAVE PLANET A.

Nonetheless I was teaching green as Damian Randle calls it. In my Information, Technology and Society course at Lewisham College I taught the History of Technology from 1,000,000 years BC and about technology and social change from about 10,000 years BC (the city of Jericho). Not forgetting the transition into agriculture and settlements; that we still haven’t recovered from 25,000 years later. There are several definitions of technology, which I shared on the course, before evolving my own namely “technology is order imposed on nature.” Put another way our most environmentally damaging “technology” is how we think about nature. We need to put context (back) into knowledge, but that’s another story…

Putting Context Into Knowledge from London Knowledge Lab

All my students had to include an assignment on the Environmental Impact of Technology reviewing how the specific technology that they had chosen, in order to analyse its social impact, also impacted on the environment. I always showed them Koyaanisqatsi to prompt discussion on our environmental impact; here’s part 1.

I learnt two things from all the good work by my students at Lewisham College. Firstly the best tool for quickly analysing our environmental impact is Product Lifecycle Analysis which looks at both where the resources from which we make any product are sourced and how they are disposed of (perhaps recycled) after use. Businesses ignore both of these key factors (why is it not a legal requirement?) in the environmental damage that we create every time we buy something. Secondly the industrial production process in itself uses vast amounts of both water and energy. Environmentally it’s way better NOT to make something that to make anything; hence reduce, reuse, recycle… As a simple rule to reduce your impact then reduce your energy use…

So I did Green My Teaching! How? Well firstly you can work on “brokering learning” between what your learners wish to learn and what the education system allows them to study. More guidance on how to broker learning here. Teachers also need to do the hard yards of working on curriculum change and writing the new units of green education that we need in order to transform learning so that it becomes fit for context. This is also true of any curriculum change involving contemporary issues concerning digital, community, politics and work, let alone environmental issues, such as climate change and the Anthropocene. If we teachers are to help learners by greening learning then we need to be capable of revising the curricula of formal education and creating a more dynamic and responsive learning offer which, unlike the planet, has been frozen since 1986 in the U.K. Or perhaps, as Bridget McKenzie puts it, we need to treat our home as The Learning Planet and incorporate it into everything that we learn about (agreed Bridget!) Look at her ideas on what we should STOP & START doing right now.

Self-determined learning is already green if you want it to be which is what we have been working on with the creativity of Heutagogy, with trusting the learner in WikiQuals and with the inclusivity of David Holloway’s Learning without Barriers project – we just need to #changetheframe of learning

Come along to New Cross Learning if you want to discuss how I can  green my learning. Thursday 4th July 10.30am 

If you are a teacher lets discuss how you can take responsibility for Teaching Green. Let’s change the National Curriculum. If you are a learner or student whether at school, college, even at our incredibly environmentally damaging Universities, come along and learn how you can green my learning. If you are an administrator, manager or even a policy wonk, come along and learn how you can green your institution with a green business strategy and a green digital strategy. After all that is in the Masters thesis that I was allowed to write. Incidentally my resubmitted thesis was also rejected initially as I had printed it on recycled paper. Recycled paper was not regarded by City University as being of good enough quality for one of their theses to be printed (in triplicate) on…

But I did help create the Creekside Environmental Education Centre in Deptford. If you do want to learn about green urban ecology take a low tide walk and learn about your green Lewisham in London in 2019; Sunday 21st July 2019

Next; Green My Library & Green My Reading…