A “Myspace High School” Mindset

PROBLEM: It has happened in elementary, middle and high schools across the United States,

Principals, teachers, school districts have complained that every day students would waste valuable "computer time" during school hours looking at Myspace, updating their profile or something of the sort. What's the value in that anyways? Right? …

SOLUTION: The result is that popular website such as Myspace, Facebook, and other social networking sites have been blocked so that students cannot go to them at all.

REACTION: The reaction, many students are bitter with the administration of the school, their teachers, who previously "nagged" them to stop using Myspace. Still other students have found one of the many ways to go around these blocks and still go to their favorite sites while professors aren't looking.

Am I advocating that schools allow students to use Myspace during school hours? No, not really. Actually not at all. What I'm actually going to write about has to do with how useful applying beneficial system-level patterns and behaviors such as those found in social networking sites to other contexts where the benefits should be translatable, such as schools. To do this we'll look at a sample scenario in the online social networking world and try to envision what a school environment would have that add similar benefits.

John comes home after a day of school that wasn't particularly interesting. He sits down at his computer at home, skims through his junk hotmail email that he left open this morning before school, then clicks on his myspace bookmark and quickly logs himself in to see what's new. No new messages it seems, but he has a handful of comments on his recent blog post titled "why I don't like math class" or something. He replies to the comments, then glances around some of his friend's profile pages for updates. He received a group event message for his "I love llamas" group, which he skimmed over but didn't really reply to. I could go on about John and his interactions on myspace, but that's not too exciting. …*etc*…

MySchool. (Yes, I know the name is silly.) Mary spent most of the day the same as any other school day. Her school had computers in every classroom, so she spent about a third of every school day working on projects and other things on the school laptops. This Friday her two last big social science blog entries on genetics are due. She almost finished one of these posts titled "my family history of diabetes." Not many people had yet uploaded their blog entries, so she wasn't able to get started reading the other 5 blog entries she was assigned to read and evaluate. She got home and went back to check her class's points in the intramural basketball league which see could track on the group page for her "MySchool." The school page let you chat with other students in your classroom during your open period of class, during lunch, as well as before and after school, but it wasn't active during other classes that might be having a lecture or a focused work day. For example, that day during Biology they'd had their final talk on genetics, and a couple times they'd been asked to quickly find a biology topic they though was interesting and upload a couple links to a new assignment page in their biology class folder. They had to stand up in small groups and present two of the articles they had come up with, and then the entire class had to write a short biology class bulletin on two of the topics they found interesting. The idea was that some students who hadn't started their genetics blog posts could get a head start themselves or with the help of others during these activities. In fact, Mary's second post was going to be about this bizarre epidemic in Papua New Guinea someone presented on that was aggravated by the cannibalistic tendencies of the tribes that were afflicted. Now that she was home though, Mary could stop worrying so much about class work and instead signed onto her school page to chat with some of her friends that were still at school or even home at this point. She was supposed to meet with a handful of people yesterday that she didn't get a chance to meet with about their final Math Podcast on their calculus topic of choice, which of course they hadn't gotten started on yet. …*etc*…

Well now. I'd be very interested to see what else people have to say about connecting social networking with the current student learning environment in high schools. There are certain school districts that are moving towards what is called "electronic portfolios," including the entire state of Rhode Island, where in 2008 15 schools have piloted a program which has begun to digitize the student learning experience. Who knows? Maybe US education would benefit from fusing the "biggest waste of student time" that is Myspace and electronic student portfolios.

The Creative School

I'm pretty excited about what Alyshia wrote, and I'd like to write my post on radical interdisciplinary design focusing also on education. RID is pretty much taking multiple unrelated fields and trying to do something useful with them combined. In this case, I'm thinking about combining a variety of artistic, scientific and other such fields to create a school.

Looking back on the things that have fascinated me late in my high school career, I realized that I always loved fields, exercises, and assignments where I created things. This would be as opposed to taking info in, spitting it out, performing, or finding out-- though I had a reasonable love of the latter of those.

For example, I never learned much in English class until I tried to create my own language (which was incidentally after reading Lord of the Rings). Then subjects and objects made sense, and gradually other things fell into place. I never enjoyed poetry until I tried writing it on my own. I never enjoyed performing on my violin, but it led me into music composition, which I enjoyed immensely. And now, though I can stand applied physics and computer science theory, and so forth, I'm always doing projects on my own, and designing new things to do-- everything from learning programming languages to designing a simple computer to be made out of TTL chips.

So the idea here, the reason I'm writing all of this, is because it dawned on me: what if there was a school that taught everything in this style? If I could roughly divide the arts into the performing and the creative, it's always the creative ones I've enjoyed (this is not to say that dance, music, etc are not creative-- but I'd rather do choreography and composition).
Why not teach all the sciences in as hands-on a method as possible. And by the time we start thinking about the liberal arts, it's awesome!

So here are some of my ideas a curriculum (and keep in mind, this would be something aimed more towards the 5th to 12th grade, but that's sort of up in the air still).

Arts
-Music: music would be taught through composition. Students would also be able to learn instruments, because reading music and the ability to play other students' compositions are still valuable. It's hard to feel comfortable composing if you can't improvise on at least one instrument.
-Visual arts: Painting, drawing, sculpture would all be staples of the art program. Students would also be encouraged to push the bounds of art and integrate it into other fields. In some ways, aesthetic design.
-Dance: an emphasis would be placed on allowing students to choreograph their own dances and shows. Of course, dance would also have to be taught so students were comfortable with making their own.

English and Literature
-English: students would be able to create their own language, which would begin after learning a second language had begun, and presumably would tie into English
-Geography: learning about how geography impacts society, from the obvious levels usually covered to stuff on the scale of Guns, Germs and Steel, students would have the opportunity to create their own "countries" that they could give a geography, culture, religion/s, government, and so forth. I know I would have totally dug this assignment as a sixth grader.
-Literature: Emphasis would be placed on writing in imitation of all the styles read: short stories, novels, non-fiction, biographies, poetry, etc.

Science, Math
-Science: the focus of science would be on creation of projects and demos that show the principles learned. Special emphasis would be given to application (engineering?).
-Math: Personally, and I don't know how applicable this is to the younger grades, but a huge amount of emphasis could be placed on drawing connections between mathematic and scientific concepts. For instance, over the past few months, we've been studying Fourier and Laplace transforms in Signals and Systems in the context of circuits and electromagnetic waves. However, they also have application in mechanics, image processing (and compression), sound processing, voice recognition, and so forth. However, I had to investigate these things on my own, and I've been absolutely fascinated.

Anyhow, that covers some of my initial ideas for such a school. As is evident, it would be a setting for major RID-- all sorts of fields would be covered, some would be ignored, but all would be used in a way so as to give students confidence in their own creations by bolstering their ability to create and recreate anything that they'd like.

Teaching-a radical idea

Take a bunch of kids.

Make a list of what they need to learn in school every year.

Get rid of school.

Take them to a museum instead. Not just any museum though. We’re going to take them to a museum specifically tailored to their education. All of the exhibits in this museum are going to be part of the curriculum, and the classroom is going to be the entire place. Students will still have a teacher, and project rooms inside the museum that can be requested for room. There will be a consortium of museums that work together so that exhibits don’t have to be changed too often. With this, we can have kids shuffle between museums, and get an amazingly hands-on education.

And why is a hands-on education better?

Something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately in light of the educational discussions going on at Olin right now is the right way to learn. Olin preaches a hands-on engineering education. Being thrown into things and figuring them out for yourself, rather than being taught. One drawback to this is that this method of learning can be very discouraging, and when discouraged, if a student doesn’t put the work in to understand some key concepts they can very easily fall behind. Even though this method of learning can be very difficult, it’s the way I’ve always wished I could be taught throughout my high school career. I used to get upset that my teachers told me information, rather than giving me the tools to solve it myself. And I found that when I did do things on my own, I always internalized the concepts much more and retained them. When I arrived at Olin, one of my worst subjects was electronics. One of the things I loved about the way I was taught was that, as long as I put effort into learning and wanted to understand, I had a TA there who would not tell me the answers, but guide me in the right direction. This method of help made learning something difficult easier than it ever had been.

Because of the supportive environment at Olin, this method does a pretty good job of ensuring that people actually don’t fall behind. I think it’s a pretty different idea, and even though it’s probably not going to happen in museums, this idea could open up a lot of questions about education as it is now.

Why do kids have the curriculum they do? Is learning in a classroom actually effective? If it is, why do we try to incorporate so many hands-on activities for kids? And why don’t we have different stimulants for kids every day, rather than bringing them to the exact same place, with almost the same lesson..?

Interdisciplinary? What isn't?!

The adjective interdisciplinary is most often used in educational circles when researchers from two or more disciplines pool their approaches and modify them so that they are better suited to the problem at hand.

--Wikipedia

We live in the 21st century. The things that surround us are the artifacts of hundreds of years of people making stuff. We have language, literature, art. We have physics, electricity, and televisions. We have roads, stop signs, and crosswalks. We have plastic bottles, Gatorade, and recycling plants.

How many of these things could be produced by a sole practitioner of a single discipline?

Hard Problems

It turns out most of the simple stuff got solved a long time ago. There was an age when a carpenter, using nothing but his knowledge of woodworking, could crank out a furniture set for a family. I guess that's still true, but how much furniture is hand made anymore? Now we design for manufacture, design for shipping, design in line with the popular stylistic tastes. If you're going to be your own carpenter you probably also need to have a good business sense and understand how to file your taxes.

How many people does it take to design something of larger complexity - a car, for instance. The construction of the frame to deal with stress and crunch zones to protect passengers, the chemical composition of the tires to resist wear and grip the road in inclement conditions, the programming of the microcontrollers that fire the airbags and blink the turn signals, the optimization of the drive train to maximize fuel economy, the design of the body of the car to be aesthetically pleasing. Designers talk to electrical engineers talk to mechanical engineers talk to chemical engineers talk to machinists talk to salespeople and marketing talk to customers talk to plant operators talk to governmental regulation agencies.

It's All a System

We live in the most complicated system man has ever produced. I have borrowed a picture of it from Wikipedia. Pretend the part that says "System" means "everything man has ever created or done" and the part that says "Surroundings" means "stuff not on Earth" and you have a rough idea of it.



Now, we can of course define smaller sections of the System that encompasses humanity and its endeavors, but if we draw anything sufficiently large, we are going to draw a box around people with fundamentally different fields and views. The era of "Mechanical Engineer" vs. "Electrical Engineer" and "Producer" vs. "Consumer" is fading away. Nowadays, people have a stronger understanding of more fields. Biology involves Chemistry, Chemistry involves Physics, Physics involves Mathematics, Mathematics ground Computer Science, Computer Science drives the computer you're reading this on now.

If you wanted to do disciplinary design, it's too late.

Advertising

When Ian Dapot came to talk to us about advertising, he introduced two popular forms of advertising. For Chanel No. 5 perfume, a sexy fantasy world is created in the commercial. This inspires audience members to buy the product so that they can experience that kind of world. For iPhones, the commercial emphasizes the human interaction with the product. I was intrigued by these two forms of commercial advertising and I wanted to take see if I could find a form of advertising that combined the two or if I could find a third form of advertising unlike either of these. I did both.

Herbal Essences:

Herbal Essences shampoo takes both the fantasy world and product interface into account in its commercials. For example in many Herbal Essences commercials, a woman is seen shampooing her hair and moaning in ecstasy followed by her tossing her perfectly dried and styled hair. This idea helps to convince the audience that the product is sexy but also shows how the product works. The following video is an example of this commercial.

In other commercials the woman is interrupted from her everyday activities by a band of attractive men who come to shampoo her hair. The commercial therefore emphasizes the sexiness of the shampoo as well as showing the end result of the smooth, volumized hair. Below are two examples of these commercials.

Obviously Herbal Essences does a good job of creating a sexy fantasy surrounding its product as well as showing the results of this product. The commercials show the viewer how much better life would be with Herbal Essences and convince them that this shampoo is the best for getting luxurious hair as well as living a sexy fantasy life.

2000 Super Bowl Commercials:

When I started to think about commercials that had nothing to do with what they were advertising, I instantly remembered the dot com commercials from the 2000 Super Bowl. The best commercial that had ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with selling its product was the “We just wasted $2 million” E*Trade commercial. This commercial has nothing to do with the website or with creating a fantasy world where you would desire the website’s uses.

But when I went to look for this commercial I found other wonderful commercials that to me had nothing to do with the product like the one below.

In this video three parrots fly around the pet store and mimic the commercial below. But parrots in a pet store have nothing to do with Budweiser. Obviously this commercial was a sequel to the "Wazzup" commercial below, but even that one has nothing to do with Budweiser except for the fact that they are holding the cans and watching the game. One could argue that that is the fantasy world that Budweiser was trying to create in the commercial, but it seems like a bit of a stretch.

Another great one from Budweiser that year was the "How are you doing" commercial which just continued to poke fun at the original “Wazzup” commercial.

And finally there is this video, which is the pets.com hand puppet sharing in the pain of lonely pets. This again has nothing to do with the products sold at pets.com

As you can see there are many different reasons that commercials are effective. Channel No. 5 sells because of its sent and because of its glamorous reputation. The iPhone sells because it is sleek, elegant, and easy to use. Herbal Essences sells because it is sexy and because it makes you hair feel softer and more voluminous. E*Trade.com sells because it is easy and straight forward to use. Maybe the commercial above doesn't represent that, but it makes you curious about the website. Budweiser sells because it is about the game and hanging out with friends. Budweiser also has the sense to make fun of itself and carry out a joke like "Wazzup" into other realms and contexts, which helps it sell even more. Pets.com sells because the hand puppet is cute and because it is a good place for you to find pet products with ease. Though some of these advertising methods are more effective than others, they all seem to work well as advertising techniques.

Theme Parks: Design for fun!

What else is designed for fun other than theme parks? Everything in a theme park is devoted to entertain “children of all ages.” Rollercoaster, water rides, arcade games, shows, face paint, you name it; it’s all there for your entertainment. But what makes a theme park fun? Waiting in line? Spending far too much money? NO! Of course not, it is the trill, the excitement, the escape from “real life” that makes theme parks so much fun. I’d like to take a quick look at some popular theme parks and explore why they are fun to me and why I think the engineers behind the scenes designed them the way they did.

Disney World:

About: Four theme parks, two water parks, and twenty-three themed hotels rolled into one getaway vacation that will ultimately destroy your bank account, but hey you had fun right? Disney World is the most visited and largest recreational resort in the world. Disney World is a great vacation spot as it has fun and excitement for all ages. There are rides and games for the littlest of children, but there are also more intense rides for those who seek a thrill. But it’s not only the rides that draw crowds to Disney World, it’s those cute characters who sign autographs, let you take their picture, or perform in shows. It’s the magic behind the rides that draws the crowds. Walt Disney was a brilliant man and he took pride in making a theme park that was a place where both adults and children could have fun. Though Disney World was the second theme park created by Walt Disney (Disneyland being the first), it was his dream park since it had a very desirable location and could be build on a grand scale. Disney's vision has continued to grow over time as Disney World itself has grown. Disney World holds a special place in the hearts of children of all ages.

Design: Disney World is designed for you to have to come many times. With each park having its own twist and each hotel having it's own theme, it is no wonder that people travel to Disney World many times before they get bored (if ever). It also has one of the largest kid themed parks. Most children cannot ride on roller coasters since they are too short, but when you introduce rides and shows geared toward younger crowds, children want to participate and parents want to allow their children to experience the "magic" that is Disney World. It is also in a location that allows the park to stay open year round. This allows for more business. By splitting up the parks into themes and designing rides and attractions into those themes, Disney World is able to bring in a huge crowd and keep them entertained every day!

Universal Studios:


About: Universal Studios Theme Parks are based around the movies that the company has produced. The original theme park, Universal Studios Hollywood, started by running tours of the soundstages and backlots where filming was underway. Today the parks have thrilling rides and shows, and even a working movie studio. I would argue that Universal Studios Theme Park is not for very young children. That being said, it can still be a ton of fun with children who are old enough to appreciate it. I feel that the shows and rides are directed at an older audience than say Disney's Magic Kingdom, but they are still very fun. Universal uses special effects and movie catch phrases to capture its audience and draw them in and it does a great job of doing this.

Design: Universal does a good job of breaking the park down into zones as you can see below.
But not only does Universal divide up its park to allow for maximum fun, it also creates rides based on commonly known movies. This alone draws crowds. Also Universal has special effect shows and gives tours of real movie studios. These are things that you cannot find elsewhere and therefore people are drawn to the park.

SixFlags:

About: SixFlags is the largest chain of theme parks in the world. There are over 21 locations in North America alone. SixFlags uses the image of Bugs Bunny and pals to help draw crowds. SixFlags is different from the other two previous parks because it is very ride based and prides itself on having some of the biggest and best roller coasters in the world. In 2005, SixFlags Great Adventure in NJ opened the Kingda Ka, which holds the current record for tallest and fastest roller coaster in the world (and also probably the record for longest wait to get on).

Design: SixFlags has a great thing going with the shear number of parks they own. Sure they don't get the kind of traffic that Disney gets at any one location, but combined they get a good number of people there each year. The beauty of SixFlags though is definitely its rides. SixFlags definitely tries to outdo itself and other parks each year. Kingda Ka was just one example of how SixFlags can outdo every other coaster. This year SixFlags has announced seven new coasters across the country and I am sure that they will be big hits.


Theme parks are dedicated to having fun. They incorporate "magic," thrills, excitement, and shows to keep you entertained and to hope you return. I love theme parks and there is nothing better than spending an entire day riding roller coasters!

Fun for Kids

During the summers of High School, I worked at a pre-school where children ages 3-5 would come and play each day. These children had the best imaginations and the best understanding of fun. They would always bring out the fun in me too. Many times I would come home covered in paint because the kids had shown me how much fun finger painting could be again. Every time a kid would paint something at the easel I would ask them what they were painting. I’d get some response like “well” *points to a big blue blob in the middle of the page* “this is a doggie, and” *points to yellow blob* “this is Mommy,” if they were 3, or “this” *points to potato person with legs* “is my friend Tommy” if they were 5. I was always amazed at how much imagination the kids would have and how much the development of the mind cut out the blue blobs and turned them into people like objects. The kids kind of made me jealous in a sense because they still had their full imagination. Not to say that I don’t have any imagination, but I don’t have nearly as much as I did when I was 3. I remember getting a play kitchen when I was 4 or 5 and though it came with play food, and a plastic oven and stove top, I did not want to have to prepare food for my family, no, I wanted to go to the moon. So I strapped on my bike helmet knocked the play kitchen on its side opened the “oven” door and sat in it turning the dials and successfully piloted a flight to the moon, landed, got out and walked on the moon, and then safely returned to earth.

This brings me to a great point. Fun things can be more fun if they can be used in multiple ways. While I enjoyed the play kitchen greatly, I also wanted to use my kitchen as a rocket ship. I highly doubt that the toy designer thought that that is what a small girl would want to do with her play kitchen, but it was. But there is something to be said for this. Maybe a better toy designer would examine the design and say hey, if I flip this over and open this “oven” door here and this “microwave” door here, it kind of looks like airplane wings. I think a great toy designer would take a minute to examine all of the potential uses for their idea, not just his or her own intended uses for it. Though I highly doubt that all of the potential uses could be apparent to any one person, I think focusing on this aspect of fun could help many toy designers to create even better toys.

This also raises another question. If play for children of these ages is about imagination and making use of the objects you have to aide your play, then are the toys we give them too constraining and too limiting. If I could use a cardboard box to create a car, or a cave, or an air plane, then why do I need a toy that is constraining my imagination into believing it is only what it appears to be. If I were designing toys (and had far too much money to spend) I would love to develop a line of toys that are very abstract and suggest many different things at once. I do not know how children would react to this type of toy and as far as I know, it has never been attempted. Imagine a plush toy with Velcro-removable parts. The toy would be very plain and could be decorated with different things depending on what the child wanted it to be. Of course this is a spur of the moment idea, so it is not fully developed (or even very good). It would be great to work with 3-5 year olds to develop a toy that would be unisex and fun for all sorts of play though.