"If people could think for themselves, we would see greater evidence of it."
Empowering Independent Creative Thinkers & Doers
I was asked the other day, "where did the craze to teach computer science to young kids come from?"
My response, "Parents."
I was then asked, "why all of a sudden? why in 2014-2016 did it become so critical for kids to learn to code and be makers?"
My response, "Parents."
The parents of today, along with the boost provided by today's Grandparents, are changing the name of the game in education. Learning to code represents a paradigm shift in our communities and schools. There is a social storm taking shape around us; in our homes, networked from one to the next, parents are enabling a great disturbance in the force of public education.
Where does it lead? What is its pedagogy? Who is in charge?
Self-leadership is a tremendous asset and skill for anyone to possess and demonstrate. When combined with creative computational logic, what is possible? Possibility testing should be part of the mandate of public education in a Society that espouses something called the "American Dream".
Sadly, for most young people attending public schools today, standardized expectations dominate the experience. Computational thinking and entrepreneurial thinking have been all but omitted from the public education system for as long as we can remember... and no one can explain why.
So, why?
To change a system that will not change itself requires leaders. These leaders do not all inherently exist within the system requiring change, and so a process of relationship building takes place between leaders of different effects. Real change requires people. People are the most important part of the process, and the methods of advancing change start by empowering Individuals.
That is where the process gets tricky; empowering Individuals.
Charity and entrepreneurship both begin with volunteer social behaviors. Social creativity and personal creativity must choose proprietary, open and personal paths to deliver the intent of that activity. Assuming the goal is success, defined in relation to time and output, one must make decisions that provide the best opportunity for success.
Does your kid code because some benevolent wealthy patron said they could and guided their approach? Does your child teach themselves? Does your child learn in a social setting from mentors? Does your child learn among peers? Does your child learn from talented Individuals or from untalented people? Does your child learn from adults who teach the way they were taught? Does your child learn from educators that invent methods based on feedback directly from diverse multi-age students?
All of these matter in determining quality and value, and affect the metrics of participation broadly.
"Learning to Code" and "Computer Science for All" as public missions are really 15-20 years late, given the advent of tools and methods that Society is being pervasively affected by. While CS is being promoted aggressively by groups such as Code.org, it is important to recognize that these groups are not the actual leaders in this movement, and come with corporate dollars and data hungry patrons providing "FREE" as if they were driving around town in a marked van offering candy to kids.
It is Individuals that we are trying to empower, not some collective vision of "Everyone" or "All" being transmuted as an opportunity corralled by some platform claiming diversity or access as their mission. Educating young people to acquire coding skills, or about the power of computational thinking and the vast empowering role that computer science is and will continue having in our world starts by speaking to Individuals. The integrity of their social participation starts by helping them understand the context of owning their own participation and all of the leveraged data relationships it has the potential to serve and create.
We are all familiar with Facebook and the NSA at this point in history; participatory illiteracy built the data model of Facebook, and has contributed vastly to the nature of the data relationship that the NSA is espousing over and among citizens of the United States and world in the name of security and freedom. Despite starting in a dorm room on Ivy League campuses, the lack of participatory literacy by Individuals even prompted the early efforts of Mark Zuckerberg to refer to the students enrolling their data in 'The Facebook' as "dumb f*cks". Let that sink in. It is no less true today than it was in 2006. Structure yields results, and the same leaders have set the goals that groups like Code.org are advocating.
Actual education understands that learning affects behavior personally, and empowering Individuals to think and act for themselves creates requirements that guide methods. When we founded FredxCoders along with mentors from Red Hat, or CodeLI.org and the Long Island Maker Faire, and as we built the underlying methods of kidOYO and the tools of OYOclass... our guiding focus was to provide our children and their peers with a safe and social space to learn wherein they were the structured owners of their own participation, ideas, data and outcomes.
These efforts began in 2006 formally...well before people became interested in an hour of coding and keeping up with the Jones family, but my own efforts to educate young people in these areas of computer science, engineering and entrepreneurship stretches back to my own early days of falling in love with the power of the internet in the early 1990's. The non-profit I founded to support my volunteer efforts was started in 2001, and today quietly but aggressively supports 10's of thousands of students in many different learning contexts.
In 2016 we have received $0 in donations, corporate funding, foundation support, or grants from research organizations. Despite being early leaders and influencing methods far and wide, no one from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has ever responded to a single email, or invited us to a single event among our peers. As this piece demonstrates, I think we have a contentious relationship forming within education circles about who is allowed to be classified as a leader systemically, and bureaucrats do not inherently find direct efforts of parents, social leaders and Individuals without system credentials of interest to collaboration. Senior "leaders" from the IEEE have chastised "maker educators" as non-professionals that should leave formal education to the professionals... an old and rather surly position that has been heard many times before... and one that begs the question, "when will "professionals" find the time and motivation to get around to building methods of learning that are motivated by Individuals seeking to escape their "over-qualified" purview and lack of substantial results until the 11th hour creates the need for them to pay attention?".
Truth of the matter is that a state-of-the-art education can be had from home in 2016... and the need to sit in chairs within brick buildings is no longer the domain of advanced learning. Often, the greatest obstacle to a relevant learning experience is the building holding learning captive, and the credentials that secure employment positions in lieu of actual education outcomes. The amount of disrespect that volunteer efforts such as our own have endured silently over the past few years from these types of bureaucratic thinkers is overwhelming and depressing.
So be it... we have quite a story to tell, and our results at empowering Individual students will speak for themselves. For example, students we have worked with for years now, who just entered 7th-9th grade classrooms, have begun preparing for the AP CS A test taught using Java... a test primarily targeted in schools to 11th grade students. One of these kids recently got an 800 on his SAT math section (1540 total)... another is selling his skills to major publishers in NYC producing Minecraft books of fiction, another finished 2nd Nationally in programming as part of the FRC robotics competition, and others are starting to have similar wide ranging successful outcomes of social influence. These kids are part of "Everyone" and "All"... they just don't think about their efforts in that way.
OYO... own your own... dominates the context of their participation. Social and technical literacy has been front and center in their efforts to learn to code and engage in projects using advanced computational thinking from the start. These kids lead classrooms whether anyone allows them to or not, and in some cases, leave classrooms to control the methods of their own learning all day every day if they believe they need to. Like a virus spreading through a living system that actually empowers people rather than harming them, these young minds are influencing the groups of students learning around them. In traditionally non-social activities like computer science, these young minds are developing leadership skills that are new to the world, and will influence everything they touch, including their future professors in higher learning, and employers in cutting-edge markets.
Thankfully, the news is not all grim when it comes to systemic support. There are pockets of Individual leaders in K-12 education, and we are finding them, or finding each other, as it may be. These Individuals tend to resonate with the OYO philosophy underpinning our efforts, and want to see more self-responsibility, personal accountability, motivation and technical literacy enter their schools and classrooms. The ideas have spreading powers... even reluctant teachers become participants once they see kids learning in this way, and have skills in their classes that raise the bar on whats possible.
Our students at kidOYO do not put their data in places like Facebook, and openly consider the ramifications of this companies purchase of tools like Whats App and Oculus Rift in terms of their participation. They evaluate the choices of developer leaders like Markus Persson "Notch" to sell out on his values and dispose of his creation to Microsoft after well-stated positions they came to respect as fellow creators. The nuance of their considerations trump most adults, and their pace of learning will dominate most classrooms.
Learning to code is about exactly this kind of self-empowerment. It represents a skill-set that omits the need for permission from experts to get started, and it enables a learning process under the control of kids as Individuals. This is the revolutionary outcome that learning to code is enabling. Methods matter, and structure yields results... learning what that means will affect the choices that young people make for the rest of their lives, and many kids who think they are "learning CS" in their classes will one day meet peers that 'OYO' skills and realize that not all methods are equal, and we are not all having the same experience... and we don't want to either.
Life is competitive... education is competitive too. Despite many educators not wishing to engage a competitive marketplace of ideas, and instead seeking collaboration that justifies the stability of their own embedded positions (way too common)... the future will yield results based on the way in which Individuals interact with learning choices. The real world is our laboratory, and every classroom should be measured by how much of that real world is visible from within its boundaries.
Around here... the real world is our only classroom. As a distributed effort, this influences everything we do, and every method we use to do it. We are not pursuing the same goals as other efforts in our periphery, we do not use the same methods, and we are not trying to dominate the world and serve "Every" or "All"... we only serve Individuals, and we only work with the schools that want to work with us and have the capability to meet us at a literate starting point. We turn down relationships with organizations that lack functional leadership, and focus our priorities on serving illiteracy by overcoming it with personal effort.
Our results speak for themselves. Without support, marketing or fanfare... our efforts are thriving and our students are becoming the leaders in our local communities. That is why we exist. And parents are the reason that will continue to be true.
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