Remixing Ideas on Making, Project Based Learning

This is a remix we began in the studio the first week of the course.  I posted the ideas from Mitch Resnick's article in the studio and invited young artists as well as adult visitors to put a dot next to ideas they like and add additional ideas on a blank piece of paper.  Below is an image of our wall so far...

Here are the original ideas... 

Start simple

Work on things that you like 

If you have no clue what to do, fiddle around 

Don't be afraid to experiment 

Find a friend to work with, share ideas! 

It’s OK to copy stuff (to give you an idea) 

Keep your ideas in a sketch book 

Build, take apart, rebuild 

Lots of things can go wrong, stick with it

(Resnick, M, 2007)

And here are our new suggestions...

(You may notice some redundant themes but with different wording - another good example of remixing!)

Just change their idea if you copy

Tops!

Put things together and see what they make

Turn a mistake into a piece of art

Keep working 

Don't give up

Let go

Remember that if you sew it will shrink if you turn it inside out

Always do your best, no matter what happens

Use your creativity and your brain

If you mess up make it better

A mess up can become a masterpiece

Experiment like me!

Use as many different ideas as you can

Don't complain if there is a mistake

Be confident

Don't do the same thing all the time (written in two colors for emphasis)

Start small

Be art smart

One of my favorite things that happened with this list was one day when a child asked if she could put a dot next to one of the hand-written ideas.  Of course!  But no one had done this - the question and then this new opportunity brought a flurry of activity back to the wall and others in other classes noticed and added more dots too over the course of the week.

Learning Creative Learning - Week 6 - Social Creativity

The Learning Creative Learning community has been a great example of social learning.  This week the discussion began by looking at the goal of free on-line courses.  Often the goal is just to deliver information to a larger number of people.  However, with LCL the goal is more importantly to bring together a community of people around ideas.

A key way artists, designers and creative thinkers learn in community is through remixing.  Artists are continually inspired by and referencing and combining the work of other artists, both contemporaries and figure from art history.  Remixing is a way to get to know a work or style, to play with it and make it part of one's own work.

Remixing is also a great form of scaffolding for those getting started.  It also leads to building relationships with other makers, to greater connections and collaborations.

Gerhard Fischer and Andres Monroy-Hernandez discussed ways that learning environments can be designed to promote remixing.  In the scratch on-line programming community specific features of the site encourage remixing and make sure credit is given to projects that are used as sources for remixes.  In the studio at Art at the Center we frequently hear the phrase, "I was inspired by..." during our sharing time.  Parents smile at me knowingly; they understand that this is a culture we work to build and celebrate.  Children are encouraged to get ideas from other artists, to give credit, to work together and to remix, to take something and make it their own.

Gerhard Fisher also spoke about how to bridge differences in communities; spacial, temporal and conceptual differences.  On-line technologies help bridge spacial differences as do artistic reproductions.  We have beautiful art books and prints so we can be inspired by other artists without being limited by the availability of the original work.  In the art studio, the space is a unifying force and often helps bridge differences in time.  In one case, a four year old artist and a ten year old artist carried on a visual conversation through paintings although they attended classes on different days each week and never actually met in the studio.  The conversation began when the older artist noticed her younger friends' mixed colors on display and liked their names.  She set about creating beach-themed colors of her own and a series of beach images left each week for the other to see began.  Conceptually, communities bridge differences in backgrounds, age and skill levels when artists have the opportunity to share process and point of view while creating and in sharing their work over time.  Sharing process, challenges, and successes as fellow artists is a great way to build empathy and interest in others.

Environmental and program design can do a great deal to encourage and support program learning.  An idea that really struck me was that of courses as seeds.  How can we design experiences that become starting points for others?  Environments that encourage and even require participant contribution to grow the seed and even to then create seeds of their own for others?

Simple beginning remixes can lead to bigger and deeper connections and relationships, from simple participation to more complex meta-design thinking about how to remix and redesign for new beginnings.  Educators work to support layers of participation within learning communities.  I liked the idea of thinking of it as a social infrastructure around remixing and collaboration.