Computational Literacies Lab

13: Designing computational futures

Week 13 (November 27)

Pedagogy is an act of design. Computing is a powerful medium for shaping our beings and our worlds. What kinds of worlds are designs for computing education oriented towards?

Notes

Logistics

  • Don't meet in discussion groups this week; meet next week.
  • Case study proposal due next Tuesday.
  • This week's topic: designing computational futures.

Discussion reports

  • Kathryn: creating informal learning spaces with flexible seating arrangements and areas for collaboration can enhance engagement. She adds that the informal atmosphere and freedom to express themselves fosters a sense of community and creativity.
  • Teachers may face restrictions due to rigid curricula and policies that limit their ability to implement connected learning approaches.
  • "Blessed, Muhammad, Kathryn: We agree that digital media plays a crucial role in supporting these efforts by providing tools and resources that enhance engagement and collaboration among diverse learners. We believe that strong and supportive relationships form the bedrock of connected learning. We are convinced that nurturing these relationships, both within the classroom and through the use of technology, can create a learning environment where students feel valued, connected, and motivated to learn. We present a compelling argument for connected learning as a powerful approach to enhance student engagement and motivation thus addressing issues of equity, justice, diversity and inclusion. By rooting learning in students’ lived experiences and identities, fostering supportive relationships, and leveraging the potential of technology, connected learning can create a more meaningful, relevant, and ultimately, more successful learning experience for all. Finally, could Actor Network theory, Rhizomatic learning theory, Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory help us create connected student-centred learning spaces in computer science fields and other non-computer science fields? Could these frameworks help us understand that learning is a shared experience where the community is the curriculum, rather than content being designed around learners?"

Notes on readings

  1. The potentional and obligation to see computing education as design.
  • Pedagogy as an act of design (Wiggins & McTighe)
  • "design is literally everywhere; from the largest structures to the humblest aspects of everyday life, modern lives are thoroughly designed lives" (p. 2). "What the notion of design signals in this work...is diverse forms of life and, often, contrasting notions of sociability and the world (p. 3).
  • Ontological design: "in designing tools (objects, structures, policies, expert systems, discourses, even narratives) we are creating ways of being" (p. 4)... "we design our world, and our world designs us back" (p. 4).
  • "The contemporary crisis is the result of deeply entrenched ways of being, knowing, and doing." (p. 19). “There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them.... Today, industrial design has put murder on a mass-production basis”; even more, “designers have become a dangerous breed” (p. 1).
  • Can design be reoriented from its dependence on the marketplace toward creative experimentation with forms, concepts, territories, and materials, especially when appropriated by subaltern communities struggling to redefine their life projects in a mutually enhancing manner with the Earth? (p. xvii)
  • Whatever is said about design here applies equally well to education. Ivan Illych.
  1. Relationality
  • We need to redesign our ontologies, from dualism (separation, control, and appropriation) to relationality. "To nourish design’s potential for the transitions, however, requires a significant reorientation of design from the functionalist, rationalistic, and industrial traditions from which it emerged, and within which it still functions with ease, toward a type of rationality and set of practices attuned to the relational dimension of life" (p. X).
  • "diseño de culturas (the design of cultures), applied to political and professional work with grassroots organizations concerning literacy, popular art, and alternative development projects, particularly with indigenous and Afrodescendant communities for whom oral traditions were still predominant" (p. xii).
  1. Designs for the pluriverse as a tool for reimagining and reconstructing local worlds.
  • Queremos un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos. "The concept of the pluriverse, a world where many worlds fit, as the Zapatista put it with stunning clarity. This has been the central problem that, largely intuitively, has reverberated throughout my intellectual life. It has also been about “living fearlessly with and within difference,” as feminists from the Global South often put it (e.g., Trinh 1989; Milczarek-Desai 2002), that is, about an ethical and political practice of alterity that involves a deep concern for social justice, the radical equality of all beings, and nonhierarchy. It’s about the difference that all marginalized and subaltern groups have to live with day in and day out, and that only privileged groups can afford to overlook as they act as if the entire world were, or should be, as they see it." (p. xvi)
  • transition design: "transition imaginations, which posit the need for radical transformations in the dominant models of life and the economy, might constitute the most appropriate framework for an ontological reframing of design."
  • autonomous design: "every community practices the design of itself." "Centered on the struggles of communities and social movements to defend their territories and worlds against the ravages of neoliberal globalization. This book contributes to outlining the fields of design for transitions and autonomous design.

Readings

  • Escobar, A. (2018). Introduction. In Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press. (pp. 1-21).
  • Explore 100 Rabbits. I suggest reading "Tools Ecosystem"

Link to PDF.