Alec Resnick's talk at Refactor Camp 2013.

1. educological possibilities
reasoning by analogy about
the Silicon Valley of
the future of learning

2. Tell compelling stories about
novel models for learning and
LONG-TERM research featuring science as
a cultural activity.
SPROUT & CO.
Make tools & materials which
MID-TERM generate those stories.
Create experiences we want
SHORT-TERM by hand to learn what’s
involved.

3. A HIGH SCHOOL IN BOSTON

4. THE OPPORTUNITY
★ Bottom 10% academically
★ Top 10% per capita spending
★ The reason families leave Somerville.
★ Looming, order-$10e6 investment
★ Socioeconomic stratification

5. IMMUNOSUPPRESSANTS
TOOL ENVIRONMENT COMMUNITY

6. MY QUESTION
What would a Silicon Valley for the
future of learning look like?

7. School offers unbeatable access & permission,
especially in metropolitan contexts.
THE HYPOTHESES

8. School offers unbeatable access & permission,
especially in metropolitan contexts.
THE HYPOTHESES
Learning happens everywhere.

9. School offers unbeatable access & permission,
especially in metropolitan contexts.
THE HYPOTHESES
Learning happens everywhere.
School politics will bend to
school economics.

10. School offers unbeatable access & permission,
especially in metropolitan contexts.
THE HYPOTHESES
Learning happens everywhere.
School politics will bend to
school economics.
To invent the future of learning, we need a
different (not better) Silicon Valley.

11. SCHOOL CAN BE REPLACED
1952

12. WHAT DOES SCHOOL DO?
services
Hang out with
people who look Daycare Learn to X Make (valuable)
capital and act like you. friends
Social capital Human capital Network capital
signalling
You can speak You’ll know other
proper English & You can build engineers or
perform affective things or write an hedge fund
labor & show up Excel macro. managers and their
on time. parents.

13. e.g. peers, elders, e.g. tools, space,
support networks stuff
GOOD LEARNING
Social Material
Intellectual
e.g. materials, notations, models

14. A MODEL: WEBDEV
Social Material
Intellectual

15. SUBSTITUTE & COMPLEMENT A substitute for a product is one A complement for a product is one
you will buy instead, if the first you will buy also, usually to make the
product is too expensive. first product valuable.
( ) ( )
*
With your partner, take some time to brainstorm as
many school substitutes & complements as you can.
Substitutes on green Post-its, complements pink.
When you’re done, put them on the paper.
* Turn to your right, figure it out.

16. Silicon Valley had cheap land, proximity to technical
WHAT’S A SVFL LIKE?
skill, easy money, ...
What affordances—social, technological, economic,
environmental, political and value—would a SVFL
benefit from?
*
With your partner, take some time to brainstorm as
many affordances as you can.
Extant affordances on green; non-existent pink.
When you’re done, put them on the paper.
* Turn to your left, figure it out.

17. It is clear now, as it was not at first, why Illich reacted with
such horror to my saying that we should push the walls of
INVERT, NOT EXPAND
the school building out further and further. That seemed at
the time a good enough way to say that we should abolish
the distinction between learning and the rest of life. Only
later did I see the danger that he saw right away. Think again
about the global schoolhouse, madhouse, prison. What are
madhouses & prisons? They are institutions of compulsory
treatment. . .
A global schoolhouse would be a world, which we seem to
be moving toward, in which one group of people would have
the right through our entire lives to subject the rest of us to
various sorts of tests, and if we did not measure up, to
require us to submit to various kinds of treatment, i.e.
education, therapy, etc. until we did. A worse nightmare is
hard to imagine.