good thing it was summer.

school was having a break, students enjoyed the weather (if and when it indeed was enjoyable) and farmers were busy bringing in this year’s harvest.

somewhere in between all these, I was doing bits of everything – helping out at my parents farm, hiking up lots of mountains and slowly getting my research on the way. and do even more hiking in the beautiful alps.

However, something has caught my eye recently:

Education

Open schools, forest kindergartens, waldorf and montessori schools are examples for this change in the school world. they allow kids to discover the world guided by their interests, with or without control, but with full responsibility for their progress. models like these naturally depend a lot on the teacher (this is not unique to this model, but true for all forms of education), which brings us to the next quote in this post: “there is no need to educate our kids. these idiots just follow our example anyway”.
So one important fact to keep in mind is that the best way to lead is to lead by example. After all, this is how humans learn: we see how something works and then we repeat it… Or do we? I remember a paper that concluded in stating that if we learn from experts, we are able to apply the more abstract concepts in different but similar situations – so-called transferable knowledge/skills.
If learnings happen amongst peers (communities of practice? i really need to read more about those..), or if you gather people who face a certain challenge and let them learn from each other, they quickly become capable of solving this exact problem all in the same way; however, if the challenge is altered slightly, success rates are dropping.
I wonder whether this also extends to self-help groups (possibly even groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous). Furthermore, how does this apply to Maker Communities? Is it experts vs. novices, or is it communities of peers? I guess it’s probably bits of both…

So a few weeks ago I attended a public discussion on the future of art, culture and science in rural areas. The people invited to the podium included Xenia Hausner, a distinguished artist and one of the organisers of the summer academy in traunkirchen, Anton Zeilinger, distinguished physicist, internationally known for his discovery of instantaneus transmission of information, or “beaming”, and Martin Hollinetz, the founder of the open technology labs OTELO.

The OTELO educational workshop types and the Traunkirchen summer academies share some characteristics (though they are aimed at different audiences, and the processes of their inception worked very differently), in OTELO being a bottom-up approach based on individual interests of local community members, and the others taking a rather classical seminar style. Both of these apoproaches in combination would, in my opinion, work very well together…

OTELO and frag den freak

The reason why I’m thinking about these things is because of my own work in the open technology labs OTELO.
My role as the organiser of workshops at the open technology enabled me to create a format called “Frag den Freak” (no, not first-person-shooter fragging, it just means ask-a-freak). The goal here is to bring experts together with complete newbies and have questions answered that laypeople do ask themselves but usually can’t find answers to themselves.

This has been received exceptionally well and has expanded to topics such as bakery, acoustics in the household, to the design of functional clothing – and many more to come!

Find anything in here you don’t agree with?
Want to know more about the OTELOs?
let me know!

🙂