Bold Ideas campaign (UB)

It is no longer possible to delineate the boundaries of a school, or even the space in which a school exists. Some of the most interesting (and troubling) incidents in our society’s transition to digital culture take place at the boundaries of schools. For example, the lead article in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine examines how children construct spaces using Minecraft, a game which feels less like a game than “a destination, a technical tool, a cultural scene, or all three put together.” (Thompson, 2016) Minecraft, like many other digital media, is a technologically-mediated, socially constructed space which is being embraced by teachers for its pedagogical potential, while at the same approached cautiously by schools wary of being held responsible for student interactions in an arena over which they have no control. Mobile digital media, in its unparalleled capacity to mediate the social construction of space, is poised to effect a collision between students, for whom mobile provides the power to redefine space, and schools, whose pedagogical goals depend on some degree of control over the space in which their members interact. We propose to research the future of the spaces in which schools with ubiquitous mobile computing will be situated, asking how students will use mobile to challenge and redefine the disciplines imposed by schools, and what roles will be available to educators in spaces over which they have only partial control.

These questions are grounded in two literatures: the social construction of space, and the role space plays in learning opportunities. Massey (2005) defines space as “the product of interrelations, as constituted through interactions,” a field of possible futures grounded in “a simultaneity of stories-so-far.” (p. 9) The structures we impose on space define “power-geometries,” (Massey, 1999) disciplines and norms constraining the roles available to their inhabitants. The space of a school has traditionally been ordered by the physical structures schools use to impose norms and disciplines–fences, courtyards, classrooms, the central office–as well as the “grammar of school” (Tyack & Tobin, 1994) which orders students’ daily routines. However, digital media, and particularly mobile digital media, has given rise to new interrelations which partially overlap our physical settings. Ito (2005) defines a “technosocial situation,” a digitally-mediated space whose participants’ interactions are defined less by physicality than by the nature of the digital medium. Students in a classroom can choose to be part of the physically-instantiated community brokered by the teacher, or they can choose, via mobile phones barely concealed beneath their desks, to participate in techno-socially constructed spaces. In choosing to participate in a different set of interactions, students reify those spaces while challenging the “power-geometries” of their classrooms. In this view, the space of a school is comprised just as much by hallways and lockers as it is by the digital space where photos and rumors spread and the online worlds students build and inhabit.

The literature of Communities of Practice (Wenger, 1999) and Situated Cognition (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989) contend that skills, knowledge, roles, and agency are contextual qualities, depending for their visibility and power on the spaces in which they are exercised. Researchers of informal learning environments, lacking the structure of teacher, curriculum, and classroom, find they need to be explicit about the space in which learning occurs, and the constitutive power of the participants’ trajectories through the space. Ma and Munter (2014) document the interplay between participant activities which define socially-produced spaces, and the shaping effect those spaces have on activities. This process affords learning opportunities, or “access to participation in in the communities of practice.” (p. 238) This approach, initially used to study informal learning environments such as skateparks, will be increasingly useful for understanding learning opportunities in the digitally-mediated spaces of formal schools as well. Even though the physical architecture and discipline of schools can compel students’ physical attendance, the mobile allows them to literally “be somewhere else.” The proposed research sits directly at the site of this conflict and seeks to explain how the ever more powerful and subtle effect of mobile will allow students to redefine schools, and how schools can be effective stewards and curators of spaces over which they have much less direct power.

Buffalo Namespace

In partnership with the city of Toronto, Google created Sidewalk Labs to explore what a computational city might look like

Suzanne’s ideas

  • First Generation Center
  • Math center
  • Computing vans
  • Solve structural racism