Greetings, fellow
voyagers in Environmental Psychology and the Quest for Eutopia,
As you know, this
class is about finding solutions to the age-old conundrum of how to
live sustainably on the only life-bearing planet we know of.
I've often given
presentations with the title “Saving the Planet: It starts at Home”
and this mantra, whether we are talking about Climate Change or
Saving Energy or Preserving Wildlife or Keeping our Air and Water
Clean and our food healthy, echoes the Ghandian saying “Be the
Change You Want to See in the World”. You may also be familiar
with the quote from Margaraet Meade, “Never doubt that a small
dedicated group of individuals can change the world, in fact it is
the only thing that ever does.”
We
ask in this class for you to come up with your own version of
Eutopia, describing to us the changes you would make to make the
world a better place. We ask you to be as realistic as possible and
to start with your own home and neighborhood and community – things
you have at least some influence on. We ask you, rather than just
thinking globally and acting locally, which is good, to approach it
from the other way around – think locally and act globally,
meaning, think about how to solve problems you understand and are
experiencing, and share your solutions with others and have faith
that your individual and collective actions here on the ground will
have an impact all over the world, because the basic problems of
survival are common to us all.
What
differs are some of the finer bio-regional details. And since you
can't assume to know what the environment of other people around the
world is, you have to start with bio-regionalism in your development
plans, thinking locally, before you can presume to think globally.
When you can solve the problems in your own backyard (doing what our
President Barack Obama called “Nation Building here at home first”)
then you might be able to assist folks in nation building abroad.
But you can't think for them, you can't really think globally –
remember from our previous lecture that “the map is not the
territory” and unless you grew up somewhere or live somewhere you
can never really know the place and the needs of the people. But you
can act globally, by sharing the solutions you came up with at home
with people who live in other environments and allowing them to adapt
your solutions to their circumstances.
James Scott, whom
I've referenced before, in Seeing Like a State, How Certain Schemes
to Improve the Human Condition have Failed, was among the first to
bring attention to the distinction between two very different types
of of knowledge: Techne and Metis.
Brand
and Karvonen (2007) in their article “The
ecosystem of expertise: complementary knowledges for sustainable
development”
(http://sspp.proquest.com/archives/vol3iss1/0601-004.brand.html)
explain
the difference by saying,
“The
problem of competing formal
expertise is exacerbated by the existence of experiential, local, or
tacit knowledge that arises from personal experience and exploration
outside the confines of educational institutions and without full
adherence to the scientific method. Scott (1998) refers to these
different forms of knowledge in his distinction between techne
and metis.
Techne
“is characterized by impersonal, often quantitative precision and a
concern with explanation and verification,” while metis
represents indigenous knowledge, meaning, experience, and practical
results. Similarly, as Lane & McDonald (2005) explain,
Levi-Strauss and Feyerabend are sig nificant among the scholars who
have observed that the “construction of [indigenous] knowledge is
holistic, territorially oriented and concrete, whereas western
science is abstract, reductionist, and separates the human from the
natural.” Lane & McDonald sum up their perspective on technical
knowledge by stating that “technical knowledge simultaneously
sharpens our focus and obscures our vision.”
Techne was usually
something development agencies tried to bring to a given developing
country -- the immutable universal; Metis was usually something
development agencies tried to supplant -- the endlessly variable,
mutable, local specific. Techne was "one size fits all" --
easy to replicate and ship around the world. Metis was intensely
place oriented -- custom solutions for custom problems.
One of the great
problems of formal education institutions has been their emphasis on
techne to the exclusion of metis. And since one of our tasks in this
course is to have each of us come up with our own vision for eutopia,
I thought I would offer you mine by starting very locally and
imagining what Mercy College could look like if we created a
Sustainability Center that seriously integrated Metis into its
curriculum and see how we might link it with the Mercy Global Center
and truly make it possible to learn how to think locally and globally
and act locally and globally in a sustainable way.
I invite you to
share this vision with me now:
Imagine a center you
could go to to learn how to 'design with and for the other 90%' .
Imagine a place you could go to and use your education to immediately
make positive changes in your own neighborhood and with others around
the world.
The
Mercy College Sustainability Center would be a new kind of
educational initiative that would draw part of its uniqueness from
the power of collective intelligence and current trends in crowd
sourcing and citizen science combined with the philosophies of the
Cooper Hewitt 'Design
for the Other 90%”
exhibit and the United Nations “Design
with the Other 90%: CITIES”
exhibit (Ironically, curator Cynthia Smith's exhibits are on display
at the Mercy Corps Action Center; we know Cynthia through our Solar
CITIES board directors Kenneth and Diane Miller who are also on the
board of the Smithsonian and Cooper Hewitt Museums; we can expect a
good synergy with them. See
http://www.mercycorps.org/events/2012/06/04/27035)
The Mercy College
Sustainability Center represents another important “experiment in
the cost-effective use of technology in teaching” (to paraphrase
Dr. Saul Fisher) placing an emphasis on the “Do-it-Yourself”,
“Try this at home”, “Home Depot” or “Local Hardware Store
and Recycled Materials” approach to environmental technologies.
It embraces the
time-honored tradition of the American “tinkerer”, of the
backyard and garage entrepreneur, and the indomitable spirit of the
inventor. It uses hands-on learning and lived experience to inspire
in students a feeling of certainty for the truth spoken by one of
America's greatest heroes, Alexander Graham Bell:
“Wherever
you may find the inventor, you may give him wealth or you may take
from him all that he has; and he will go on inventing. He can no more
help inventing that he can help thinking or breathing.” ―Alexander
Graham Bell
Bell
also famously said, “A man, as a general rule, owes very little to
what he is born with – a man is what he makes of himself.”
A Sustainability
Center that is founded on this can-do ethic would indeed be truly
sustainable. It would foster a keen eye for endless improvements and
higher efficiencies, for getting ever bigger bangs for the buck, for
doing more with less. It would train its trainees to think outside
every box and yet be able to integrate and package diverse systems
into one functioning, problem solving whole. It would help students
make of themselves the very best they can be in service to
themselves, their families, friends, communities and the greater
society and the ecosystems of the planet.
In the aftermath of
Hurricane Sandy and its catastrophic impact on New York and so many
other parts of our nation and with the impending threats of more
unnatural and natural disasters to come, our mandate is making a
Sustainability Center that is as useful as possible to the people of
New York in particular, and to the US and the World in general, and
that is capable of weathering not just the weather, but economic
crises and instabilities as well.
We
recognize that Mercy College, as a small liberal arts college with a
majority of Pell grant eligible students and very modest financial
means, has limited space and facilities. Nonetheless it occupies
great strategic locations, particularly the Dobbs Ferry campus
overlooking the Hudson River in sight of Manhattan. If it positions
its sustainability efforts in the traditions of technological
pacifist leader Mahatma Gandhi and British economist E.F. Schumacher,
author of “Small is Beautiful”, if it follows in the footsteps
of the pioneers of appropriate technology, and if it utilizes
Ghandi's development philosophy where “everyone
is considered an education resource, the teacher as well as the
student and the literate as well as illiterate” then we can create
something as appealing to students and funders as it is unique, and
something that will grow and endure.
It
will also teach meaningful cross-disciplinary and applied science,
and prepare Mercy students to be leaders in research and development
(R&D) and in regional and international development, in disaster
preparedness, crisis prevention and emergency management. Our
students will have the confidence to enter the new 'green' job
markets, and to join international aid and relief efforts and start
social entrepreneurial businesses at home and abroad.
In
India the educational approach to sustainability I'm suggesting for
Mercy's Sustainability Center is often called “The Barefoot
Approach” (http://wp.barefootcollege.org/barefoot-approach/).
Its
success over the past 40 years in “Empowering the Rural Poor to
Develop Themselves” was noted at the International Symposium on
Lifelong Learning 2011 in the keynote address “Demystifying
Education: The Barefoot Approach”
(http://www.ied.edu.hk/isll/Download%20Files/Panel1_%20Mr_Sanjit_Bumker_Roy.pdf)
and it can apply to urban dwellers as well. It is in alignment with
Mercy's PACT approach, giving educational self-determination priority
over externalized attempts at 'standardization' and sidestepping the
techno-politics of what Timothy Mitchell (2002) called the “Rule of
Experts”. Applied to urban and suburban education in a developed
country like America that nonetheless has to deal with severe
environmental and socio-economic challenges, this approach would
yield dramatic positive and appealingly unconventional results and
multiplier effects.
Models
for Mercy to Follow:
My recommendation
is that we follow, in many regards, two existing models for
sustainability centers. One is the Barefoot College in India, the
other is the Arava Insitute for Environmental Studies in Israel.
The
"Barefoot College" Model from Tilonia, Rajastan, India,
which I visited with the India Youth Climate Network in 2009. has
proven the efficacy of the 'bricoleur' or tinkerer education
approach, now emphasized in the World
Bank Education Strategy 2020,
since 1971. Barefoot College's visionary founder Bunker Roy showed
us his answer to sustainability education: teaching people from
whatever background (in the case of his college a deliberate
selection of illiterate women from around the world who were between
35 and 60 years of age) how to build their own renewable energy,
water purification, pumping, waste management and food production
systems at the home and community scale and then empowering them to
go back to their countries, train others, and start
micro-enterprises to solve local problems that could scale up and
become more sophisticated with greater capital investment.
A
visit with the women, conversations with them and observations of the
results they obtained, convinced me and others in our educational
technology group that this approach has the highest chance for
success in our times and produces the biggest bang for the buck.
There would be
extreme merit in adapting the Barefoot approach for Mercy College,
keeping in mind that despite the fact that we, like Barefoot
College, have no engineering faculty at the school, that there are
no physics or chemistry classes or laboratories and that we have no
dedicated building or equipment for such activities, we can
nonetheless create a sustainability program of the highest quality,
one that is of broad appeal and one that can garner Mercy College
high visibility and attractiveness for student recruitment and
funding opportunities.
The fact is that the
kind of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) skills
needed to effectively build and install, implement and operate
sustainable environmental technologies, can be learned by almost
anybody anywhere. The construction skills required are already
resident in a huge number of individuals in almost every community,
and the theoretical and applied science background can be easily
delivered and understood because it is relevant to peoples' survival
and taps into deeply encoded attention structures.
At Mercy we would be
one of the first East Coast institutions of our size to formalize the
kind of informal learning that puts science and engineering to work
for community benefit.
Creating a hands-on
Center for student learning of both the theory and the practice of
sustainable development (“sustainability praxis”) at a small
liberal arts college with no facilities for such activities could be
seen as huge challenge, but in another sense this can be seen as an
ideal opportunity. In the Barefoot College approach the assumption
is that students actually come from impoverished areas with no
technical background and that they normally face severe material
constraints. The emphasis is then on learning how to build solutions
to life's existential challenges using local and found materials and
becoming savvy in how to obtain critical components from the market
and do the necessary systems integration to achieve success.
And
achieve success they have – becoming famous the world over for
turning out students who go on to become entrepreneurs and community
leaders. In an article on the betterplace.org website
(http://www.water.betterplace.org/ws_casestudy_barefootcollege.html)
it is pointed out that
“To date, the
Barefoot College approach has benefited 900 communities, not only in
India but also in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Mauritius, Senegal, the
Gambia, Sierra Leone and Mali.”.
Having seen many of
these successes overseas with my own eyes, I've asked myself, “where
are students being trained in America to handle the real challenges
of sustainable living?”
Many of our
students gain valuable field experience in the Peace Corps or doing
missionary work, but there are very few places in America where
college students get trained to not just become aware of the
challenge of sustainability in a textbook sense, but adept at solving
those challenges with their own hands.
In Israel this kind
of education has been taken up by the Arava Institute for
Environmental Studies where I have given several workshops and for
whom I was the keynote speaker at their alumni conference in Aqaba,
Jordan. To end the conference, after a lot of talk about
sustainability, a group of us headed back across the border to Eilat
and spent a day at the Intstitute building biodigestors on the campus
to turn its food waste into energy and fertilizer for new food.
Arava brings Israelis, Palestinians, Arabs and international students
together and gives students opportunities to innovate their own
solutions to the problems of survival (water, energy, shelter,
pollution) that exacerbate political tensions.
The Arava, situated
on a Kibbutz in the arid south of Israel, takes Praxis seriously and
trains its students to be able to solve environmental problems in
their home country as well as sending them to other countries to be
involved in relief efforts, creating peace through local and
appropriately scaled environmental engineering.
Mercy College in
particular and the New York City and Suburban landscape in
particular, offers much much more in the way of “out of the gate'
opportunity, materials, and possible subsidy or seed-funding than
Barefoot College had when it began in the remote part of Rajastan
where it is situated or than the Arava had when it started in the
deserts of Israel. My thought is that we as Americans should be able
to achieve the same successes as India and Israel has been able to
achieve if we put our hearts and minds to it.
Greetings fellow voyagers. For my
relational summary this week I'd like to take a look at the topic of
Environmental Perception and Cognition which Bell writes about in
Chapter 3 of our textbook. In particular I want to explore the areas
of Cognitive Maps, the discussion of which starts on page 70, and
Wayfinding, which they discuss on page 88.
I'd also like to model for you how to
go about your own relational summaries.
The first thing I do is flip through
the chapter and look at the parts I underlined and at the notes I
made in the margins as I was reading it. I notice, for example, that
on page 71 the author has a diagram of Lynch's five elements for a
cognitive map.
He identified Paths, Edges,
Districts, Nodes and Landmarks. We are told,
and here is my first quote,
“As a planner, Lynch was among the
first in his field to try to understand such subjective concerns as
people's feelings about the quality of their environment and how
their perceptions could be used in environmental design.” The text
informs us that Lynch's book “the Image of the City” remains a
classic reference in cognitive mapping.”
I notice that on page 72 my margin
notes say “One person's path is another's edge: Khan El Khalili
contested meanings”. What did I mean by that? Why did my brain
react to the textbook this way?
See the way I read books is that I
REACT to things the authors say and try to get into a dialectical
conversation with them. I don't just nod and think, “well, he's the
expert so let me just try to memorize what he says” I think,
“hey... that sentence or paragraph makes me uncomfortable, it
reminds me of something I observed when I was living in Egypt about
how the rich treated the poor. Let me see if the author can help me
understand what I expereinced!”.
The point that struck me about Lynch's
categories when I read them in Bell is that he said they were
SUBJECTIVE – in other words they didn't reflect REALITIES about the
environment – they reflected perceptions of the people in that
environment. And each of us has different perceptions. In other
words, Lynch's work was important to me in my quest to fix a broken
reality because he made explicit that maps are NOT objective.
We'd like to think they are, or more
appropriately, the people who pay for them to be made would like to
act as if they were, but the truth is they are not. This is why
James Scott from Yale insisted we understand that “the Map is NOT
the territory”.
Just take a look sometime on Mercy
campus and see where the “official paths” are, and where students
have carved out their own muddy path across the lawn. And notice how
many times grounds keepers have to keep posting signs saying “keep
off the grass” and how many signs exist everywhere saying
'restricted area – keep out'.
The fact is that all space is contested
space and everybody would draw a different map if they had their way.
In Egypt's famous bazaar market, Khan El Khalili, a road way was
created by the government that cut the community into two pieces. On
one side of the highway they kept the tourist market, which
increasingly sells goods made to look like there are authentically
Egyptian but mostly imported from China. On the other side of the
highway they left the old craftspeople whose dying arts in
handicrafts cannot earn them a decent living. To make matters worse,
they only created a couple of bridges spaced far apart, and put a
fence on both sides of the road and a tall traffic barrier in the
middle. The net effect was to completely cut the poor community off
from the major market and to keep tourists from being able to easily
access old Cairo. This increased poverty tremendously.
On the map the intent could be seen,
from a bird's eye view, to increase efficiency – a more of less
straight line from the Nile and downtown Cairo to the airport road.
But a bird's eye view doesn't take in the daily lives of the people
and their needs, and the “view from on high” is typical of
planners who work for governments ruled by the wealthy elites who
really do think they are above the rest of the population. They
literally do “look down” on the poor, if they notice them at all.
The same planning debacle was famously
done by Robert Moses to New York. The famous book about this
infamous man is called “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall
of New York” and if I hunt on Google I find some interesting
readings about how he used path planning to increase poverty in
Manhattan. In an article called “Did Robert Moses Ruin New York
City?” found at
http://online.barrons.com/article/SB50001424052748704759704577271393988247900.html,
JOAN MARANS DIM says,
“ Moses, with his maze of highways,
left an unforgivable stain on New York's landscape. Ride the Cross
Bronx Expressway or Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and you'll understand
why old timers who once lived in the neighborhoods they afflicted
still curse him...Moses was a zealot who built a city for automobiles
and those who could afford automobiles. And therein lies Moses'
greatest flaw. He cared not a whit for the working stiffs, who didn't
need or couldn't afford an automobile. In 1929, when the Second
Avenue Subway was proposed, Moses wasn't keen on it. In 1942 and
again in 1954, when the city attempted to build that line, Moses
prevented funds he controlled from being allocated to the project,
preferring instead to spend them on building expressways between his
bridges through densely populated neighborhoods in the Bronx and
Brooklyn
IMAGINE IF MOSES HAD
TEMPERED his actions with consideration of the needs of all
the people. Picture the Triborough Bridge (now known as the RFK
Bridge, in honor of Robert Kennedy) with a rail system connecting
Manhattan to La Guardia and Kennedy airports. Picture a Second Avenue
line. When Moses gained power in 1924, New York City had one of the
world's most modern subway systems. When he was ousted from power in
1968, it had one of the worst-maintained systems.”
So this innocent diagram on page 71 of our book isn't so innocent
after all. Planners like Moses use maps and the 5 essential elements
to sell their ideas, and often their ideas “don't care a whit for
working stiffs”. Ask yourself, “why isn't my house a landmark?
Why are the houses of the rich and famous landmarks? Why is y
district a district? Who made it so? Who made the ghetto the ghetto?
Where is the edge that separates those struggling to get relief from
the devastation that Hurricane Sandy created, and who created that
edge? Is it possible that some of the destruction was caused less by
Sandy than by the planners who carved up the city into districts and
paths and edges? How does what is happening in New York mirror what
happened in New Orleans a few years ago?
Yup, Environmental Perception and Cognitive Maps aren't the clean,
uncontroversial areas you might imagine them to be! As Bell says on
page 73, “In addition to the physical characteristics of a city or
rural environment itself, you might expect that individual or
cultural differences would cause people to place varying weights on
certain environmental features.” This quote is about what Lynch
called the “Legibility” of landscapes – remember that in
Chapter 2 on page 45 Bell defined Legibility as “the degree of
distinctiveness that enables the viewer to understand or categorize
the contents of a scene – the greater the legibility, the greater
the preference.” Of course our Bell reading is a textbook so it
bends over backward not to be controversial. But Legibility has a
long history in political economics and is something that Yale
Professor James Scott talks about in his book “Seeing
Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve
the Human Condition Have Failed .
In that book legibility has many meanings.
Venkat, in his blog “RibbonFarm: Experiments in Refactored
Perception”
(http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibility/)
does a nice job of summarizing:
“James C. Scott’s fascinating and seminal book, Seeing
Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve
the Human Condition Have Failed, examines how, across dozens
of domains, ranging from agriculture and forestry, to urban planning
and census-taking, a very predictable failure pattern keeps
recurring. The pictures below, from the book (used with
permission from the author from pages 16 and 17) graphically and
literally illustrate the central concept in this failure pattern, an
idea called “legibility.” .
States and large organizations exhibit
this pattern of behavior most dramatically, but individuals
frequently exhibit it in their private lives as well. Scott calls the
thinking style behind the failure mode “authoritarian high
modernism,”
Here is the recipe:
Look at a complex and confusing
reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city
Fail to understand all the
subtleties of how the complex reality works
Attribute that failure to the
irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own
limitations
Come up with an idealized
blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like
Argue that the relative simplicity
and platonic orderliness of the vision represents
rationality
Use authoritarian power to impose
that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary
Watch your rational Utopia fail horribly
The big mistake in this pattern of failure is projecting your
subjective lack of comprehension onto the object you are looking at,
as “irrationality.” We make this mistake because we are tempted
by a desire for legibility.
So the quest for easy legibility turns
out to be behind many of our failures in the quest for Eutopia.
Venkat goes on, explaining,
“High-modernist (think Bauhaus and Le
Corbusier) aesthetics necessarily lead to simplification, since
a reality that serves many purposes presents itself as illegible to a
vision informed by a singular purpose. Any elements that are
non-functional with respect to the singular purpose tend to confuse,
and are therefore eliminated during the attempt to “rationalize.”
The deep failure in thinking lies is the mistaken assumption that
thriving, successful and functional realities must necessarily be
legible. Or at least more legible to the all-seeing statist eye in
the sky (many of the pictures in the book are literally aerial views)
than to the local, embedded, eye on the ground.
Complex realities turn this logic on its head; it is easier to
comprehend the whole by walking among the trees, absorbing the
gestalt, and becoming a holographic/fractal part of the forest, than
by hovering above it.
This imposed simplification, in service of legibility to the
state’s eye, makes the rich reality brittle, and failure
follows. The imagined improvements are not realized. The metaphors of
killing the golden goose, and the Procrustean bed come to mind.”
I've now used at least 3 outside reading quotes in my relational
summary so far, and a couple of quotes from our main textbook, so for
brevity's sake I'll bring this section to a close, but I urge you to
read Venkat's blog post, particularly his section on 'The Psychology
of Legibility” and see how so much of what we are doing is trying
merely to ease our own anxieties about what we perceive as the
threat of “chaos”.
Making the world legible to us through simplification is
important for our own wayfinding. The problem is that each person has
a different cognitive map and a different sense of legibility and
chaos. After all, how many couple fight precisely because the spouses
have different ideas of what makes for an ordered, legible household
and what constitutes an intolerable chaotic state of affairs?
This is an age old problem and goes back to the origins of
cognitive map making.
Let me talk about cognitive map making
as it relates to my experience:
Almost all animals, and increasingly
robots as well, make cognitive maps. These are maps that stay inside
the mind of the organism or machine and guide their movements.
Recently I had an opportunity to ride
in the self-driving Google car – a real “AUTO” mobile in that
it was truly auto mobile –autonomously driven. It was a normal
Toyota Prius plug-in hybrid with a laptop computer in the back
connected to a box that controlled the electronics of the car driving
the steering, acceleration and braking.
On top of the car a LIDAR unit was
mounted, continuously making 360 degree sweeps and scans of the
environment. The programmers told us that they must drive the car
through the neighborhood once to create the cognitive map for the
steering computer. Once in the computer's memory the car uses the
map to navigate and drive itself by comparing what the LIDAR sees in
the present to what it saw in the past. Naturally this map is
updated each time it drives to include new objects.
This is called an “eidetic memory”
. Many organisms have it and some, like our cousins the great apes,
can use it more effectively than we – taking mental snapshots that
they can maintain with fidelity.
You may have seen the famous case of
the chimpanzee that can reproduce entire sequences of numbers on a
computer screen, playing a kind of flash card memory game, faster and
more accurately than any human.
There are some human beings who posess
extraordinary photographic memories too, like tk who draws vast
landscapes reproducing every detail after flying over them only once
in a helicopter.
But for most humans memory is somewhat
more plastic if more imperfect and so we tend to insert our own
imagery into the map.
While this can cause problems it also
unleashed the powers of our imagination for we found that we could
give the maps we created of our world features of our own creation.
We could give the visions from our dreams their own coordinates in
our representations of the real world and for the first time we could
plan. Psychology Today in an article called 'The Truth About
Photographic Memory” stresses that
“While people can improve their
recall through tricks and practice, eidetikers are born, not made...
The ability isn't linked to other traits, such as high intelligence.
Children are more likely to possess eidetic memory than adults,
though they begin losing the ability after age six as they learn to
process information more abstractly.
Although psychologists don't know why children lose the ability,
the loss of this skill may be functional: Were humans to remember
every single image, it would be difficult to make it through the
day.”
In other words, we need to simplify our own memories and internal
maps if we are going to plan, and if we are going to be creative in
how we plan, it can even help to have an imperfect memory, making us
less rigid. And there-in lies the paradox, a contradiction that
shows just how broken our natural reality is – on the one hand
simplification and errors make us less rigid thinkers, on the other
hand, we use simplification and the legibility these “errors”
help us create to IMPOSE on others even more rigidly, as if our
imperfect maps somehow provide perfect solutions to reach our perfect
world or utopia. Perhaps this is why F.A. Hyek blamed planners as
being among the worst dangers to society in his seminal Holocaust era
book “the Road to Serfdom”.
My
good friend Paul
Sagawaa
wall street analyst and Harvard Business school graduate, pointed out
recently the dangers he sees in economists acting as though
mathematical models, which are simplified maps of complex realities,
when the start trying to plan the economy on the basis of those
simplifications. He wrote:
|”Economists are wanna-be physicists,
chasing a chimera of a deterministic mathematical model that can
adequately describe the workings of aggregated human behavior.
Whether Keynesian, Monetarist or Supply-sider, the empirical evidence
is inadequate to test any of the major schools of macro-economic
thought with enough scientific rigor to support the confidence with
which the proponents of these sc
hools are willing to state their
projections and policy recommendations. Thus Keynesians are SURE that
a reduction in government spending combined with a tax cut will cause
a massive contraction in demand that would plunge us into a negative
spiral, Monetarists are SURE that Fed interest policy has us on track
to Wiemar Republic style hyperinflation, and Supply-siders are SURE
that raising tax rates will result in tax avoidance behavior that
would actually reduce government revenues while creating
disincentives to investment that would increase unemployment. Since
there is no real proof that any of these warring schools is actually
correct, adherence is more a matter of philosophy, faith and
self-interest, than logic. The dirty secret underlying the
elaborate mathematical models underlying the various economic
conceits is that they assume that there are underlying constants in
the behavior of human beings. To pick on Keynesians for a moment, the
idea that there is a fixed "multiplier" - constant like
Avogodro's number or the speed of light - that determines the effect
of government stimulus spending on the overall economy is silly.
Human reaction to economic conditions is complicated, greatly
effected by emotion, and changes over time with learning. To assume
that the economy's response to policy today would be the same as it
was in the '30's, the 70's, or even the '90's, seems naive, when the
national mood has turned so unusually pessimistic, when our
relationship to the rest of the world economy is in such flux, and
when the debate over economic policy is so open and
antagonistic. Personally, I think national psychology is the MOST
important factor in economic recovery. We need a nation that really
BELIEVES that it is on the road to prosperity before we can actually
make progress toward that end.”
Paul's Wall Street perspective targets
something that simple models or maps don't have room to accommodate –
feeling. Mood. Psychology.
How do you make a cognitive map of
those 'intangible' and 'messy' parts of reality?
We humans do make maps out of emotions – call them emotional
maps if you like, and we often take our sense of direction from these
rather than logical maps. From this we get the saying “People will
almost never remember what you said, will rarely remember what you
did, but will almost always remember how you made them feel”. We
often say we are “following our instincts” – which are
feelings, rather than reason, or any logical map. We say 'I am going
with my gut'. But what is the gut feeling? Is it some combination
of the visual map and Lynch's five elements, with another sixth
element overlaid on it – a kind of emotional landmark, a feeling
node, an edgy edge? Is the problem that we've oversimplified reality
to make it legible and then forgotten what we threw out? Does our
planning get messed up because we left out of our cognitive maps the
very things that we actually were planning for – safety, security,
dignity, happiness?
When I was studying Orangutans in the
primary rainforests and jungles of Borneo we found that they could
plan too. They would anticipate when certain trees in their vast
territory would come into fruit and journey there at the precise time
to beat all the other less intelligent animals. But while they could
plan a trip based on future expectations they couldn't plant a new
fruit tree closer to home so their planning was restricted to
following the admittedly dynamic map in their minds. They could plan
for greater happiness. Certainly not for a better life, for liberty
and the pursuit of happiness.
To a certain extent they and almost all
animals that build nests can also plan to change their cognitive maps
and change their environments. They must visualize the place where
they want to build their nest, then go and gather the materials they
need and update the map with every alteration they make. But once an
organism has the ability to fix a map by drawing lines in the sand,
in mud or clay or on paper, more impactful changes can be made. The
question is, by fixing a map into a form outside the mind, do we lose
sight of the reasons we wanted to map in the first place? By removing
the map from the brain-body complex with its filters and emotions and
memories, do we abstract it into a dangerous form that actually makes
us lose our way?
One of the paradoxes of mapping, as
I've mentioned , is that it can also make people blind to change.
The necessary act of simplification to accommodate the limited
dimensions and skills available is often a blessing –
neuroscientists like David McLean, author of the Triune Brain theory
– have long suggested that the brain itself acts as a filter,
radically simplifying the bewildering mass of data that our world
affords us so that we can make sense of things, only letting us
perceive information that we can successfully use and make sense of.
We don't even have the sensors we would need, which bees have, to
perceive ultraviolet light, or which mosquitoes and leeches and
snakes, robots and even automatic doors and lavatory faucets and TV
remote controls have to see Infra Red light. We don't have the
ultrasonic sensors that bats and dolphins to navigate with sonar or
which many cars now have to keep from colliding into something when
backing up. The frequency response of our ears is limited to a range
of 20 to 20,000 Hz - whales go much lower and dogs go much higher.
But sometimes less information can be useful – for example color
blind people are often asked by the army to look at photographs of
potentially camouflaged enemy weapons because they aren't easily
fooled by similar colors.
Too many features can make a cognitive
map impossible to understand so even when organisms have all the
sensors they may need to pick up details of the world around them the
brain, particularly a part of the brain called 'the reticular
formation', 'la rete mirable' or the 'marvelous network' learns to
pick out the salient features and ignore the rest. Over time we
become habituated to features in our environment that are unchanging
or seem to pose no threat or have no survival advantage and so we
often simply don't notice them. But for that exact reason we can
become too complacent trusting simplified maps, and when we commit
the incomplete information to paper and then use an
oversimplification to make decisions we can make mistakes.
Once again I repeat that it is for this
reason, Yale Professor James Scott, in his classic “Seeing Like a
State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition”,
cautions us that “The map is not the territory”. I want to drum
that into your heads!
Increasingly, however, because of our
ability to map and model in 3D and create virtual reality
representations of our environments, the map and the territory
actually can converge and almost be the same thing, at least as far
as our limited senses are concerned. With multimedia we can add
layers of nuance and emotion, using music and soundeffects and the
tools of the artist to capture a more faithful representation of the
reality we are trying to describe with out maps.
Because too much information can be
confusing 3D map makers also work to simplify things, but they try to
do so in meaningful ways. It isn't just because of computer speed
and bandwidth constraints that video game developers use a lot of
tricks to simplify the objects in a scene. Too much realism can not
only burden the CPU and crash the computer or make the processor run
agonizingly slowly, it can also make a game aesthetically unplayable
as a player struggles to figure out what she sees or hears from the
screen is important to achieving the game's goal objective. There
are many games that have open ended environments, like World of
Warcraft and Second Life, but they too limit the amount of landscape
you and your computer must process at any given time, and they tend
to use low 2D texture images for backgrounds and distant objects
instead of three dimensional objects.
Still, computer games today,
particularly those that run on high-end computer systems and consoles
like Xbox 360 and the PS3 and Wii, can so faithfully represent real
environments that it can almost feel like you are there. My wife's
young cousin plays Assasin's Creed when he gets home from his history
class because he feels he can explore Renassaince Italy better by
wandering through the canals of a virtual Venice. Many years ago I
used to teach in South Los Angeles and once visited the famous Watt's
Towers artistic landmark that commemorates the first L.A. Uprising.
Since I now live in Germany I couldn't easily take my friends there,
but I was able to take a virtual trip there to show them what it is
like by getting on a bicycle and riding there in the game Grand Theft
Auto San Andreas (one can also carjack some serious wheels to get
there, but as a bike rider that isn't my style!).
Several years ago, while living in the
slums of Old Islamic Cairo and working with the architects there I
was able to use their 3D models of our neighborhood to put it into
the Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion game engine. I georeferenced the models
with Google Earth and brought that into the game too, and oriented
everything with the location of north in the game so that when the
sun rose and set in-game it corresponded to the real location of the
sun in Cairo. In this way I was able to put virtual solar panels on
a 3D model of my actual roof and look at shading and shadows at
various times of the day without having to go on the real roof. It
occurred to me that this could be a very valuable tool for planning,
and I am now working on creating a “sustainable development
simulator”.
There are, of course, games that let
you simulate a city, like Sim City and Sim City Societies and equip
your town with windmills and solar energy stations , and now in the
Sims 3 you can actually build your own house and put solar panels on
it and you can have your characters drive around in a hybrid or
electric car. But of course the houses and buildings you build in
these simulation engines are based on fantasy maps with no
correspondence to the real world.
Nonetheless, real world 3D mapping is
getting more and more common place. Google Earth has several modules
which can help you get a virtual look at reality on your computer.
You are probably familiar with Google Earth Street Map View.
But there is also a unique new tool
called Building Maker that lets you be part of a collective
architecture project turning Google Earth into a 3D replica of the
real earth. http://www.sketchup.com/3dwh/buildingmaker.html
The way it works is that you download
the Google Earth Plug in for your browser, then you select a city,
create a virtual building with simple tools using photographs of the
real building that they provide, upload your model for review and if
they approve it (which is most likely if you follow the simple
instructions) everyone in the world can see it and fly through it on
Google Earth or on Google Maps in your browser.
The point is that for the first time in
human history we have the ability to make maps that complexify
information rather than simplify it. Yet these are maps which,
because they involve all 3 of the dimensions we are used to living in
(as well as other dimensions of sound and time-lapse and
socio-political feeling – creating the so-called 5D landscape) are
actually more legible than the 2D maps we've relied on for so many
millenia. And they are legible in customizable ways – they can be
rendered in any textual or visual language, incorporating all of the
differing cultural elements that were left out by simplifying maps.
Using technology to embrace the
complexity of the world and understand it not through reduction, but
through holistic comprehension, may be what saves us after all. To
use yet another quote from our readings, let me turn to Jane
McGonigal's quote from Kathi Vian in her introductio to the
Superstruct Ten-Year Forecast on page 343 of Reality is Broken:
“Zoom out” she says, “Look at the
coming decade from the perspective of millenia of change. Focus on
the progress of the universe from the breakthrough structures of the
atom to the living cell, the biota, the community of nations, the
global economy. This is how the future will be new, by continuing the
incredible experiment of reorganization for greater complexity, by
creating the next astonishing structural forms in this long
evolutionary path.”
Jane concludes, “It seems clear to me
that games are the most likely candidate to serve as the next great
breakthrough structure for life on earth. There's no guarantee, of
course, that evolution will continue along any given path, other than
the path of improved survivability in a given environment. But all of
the historic evidence seems to suggest that collaboration improves
human survivability and will continue to do so, as long as we can
innovate new ways of working together. First humans invented
language. Then farming, and cities; trade and democratic forms of
government and the Internet – all ways of supporting human life and
collaboration at bigger and more complex scales. We have been
playing good games for nearly as long as we have been human. It is
now time to play them on extreme scales. Together, we can tackle
what may be the most worthwhile, most epic obstacle of all: a
whole-planetary mission, to use games to raise global quality of
life, to prepare ourselves for the future, and to sustain our earth
for the next millenium and beyond.”
To do this, I believe what we need is
to create new kinds of ever more complex and at the same time
universally AND idiosyncratically legible cognitive maps of this
brave new world we want to create.
And it starts with you, playing the
game, engaging in the dialectic, sharing your view of the world so we
can fit your unique landmarks, nodes, paths, edges and districts
onto the same map, trusting that in a 5D world, all maps, no matter
how distinct they appear, can overlap and help us to safely reach
the same desirable destination.
Transcipt of Video 1, Above: Syllabus Introduction
In
this course we explore something historically novel: the blending and
democratized application of environmental psychology, positive
psychology, educational theory and computer gaming technology to the
possibilities for meaningful community participation in sustainable
development and to the making of new and better worlds both in fantasy
and in reality. That is a fancy way of saying we will look at how new
technologies and new knowledge of how human beings and societies relate
to, function in and change their environments open up new possibilities
for problem solving on both a personal level and on an epic scale.
In this course we explore how we can all contribute to the creation, realization and implementation of our own ideas of eutopia.And in this course you get a chance to share your vision of “the good place” (Greek: Eu = Good; Topia = Place)with
your peers and instructors and, thanks to the advent of globalized
internet based social media technologies, the entire world.
And that means that you have the possibility for having an impact and literally changing the world. For the better. Your way.
Background:
Sincethe
beginning of recorded history human beings have looked at their
environment as it is and then used their powers of imagination to
conceive of alternatives that pleased them more. This ability to invent
worlds that do not yet exist seems to be uniqueto humansamong
all of the earth's lifeforms and the capacity to act on those fantasies
and actual create such worlds almost certainly distinguishes us from
all the other species with which we share the planet.
The ancients fixedtheir
fantasies in legends and myths, thinking out loud through poems and
stories and songs, and then thinking out louder through the magic of the
written word. Books such as Plato's Republic, for example, were able to
broadcast and carry the thoughts and ideas of small groups and
individuals all around the world, enabling new forms of civilization and
its governance to be tried out thousands of miles from their point of
origin.In
the Middle Ages and Renaissance periods books like Thomas More's
“Utopia”, Francis Bacon's “A New Atlantis” and Thomas Campanella's “City
of the Sun” explicitly used the power of “story” to help people
pre-visualize what a 'better' world might look and feel like.
Books were not the only ambassadors of alternative realities of course.Drawings and paintings, sculptures and models,theater plays, dance, opera and circuses,athletic games and board games,all
of these media were put into service at one time or another to express
visions and possibilities for creating different environments and
different relationships between human beings and between humans and
non-humans in those environments.
In
the 20th century the harnessing of electromagnetic waves as carriers of
such visions dramatically extended the reach and impact of humanspeculative fictions. Radio and films and televisionallowed people all over the planet to experience very realistic and dramatic ideas of possible worlds in a way thatfelt as emotionally impactful as dreams,giving everybody who listened or watched the conviction that they had the capacity to be epic dreamers,“seers with conviction”–
visionaries. And as more and more people realized they could use these
technologies to express their own ideas of what the world could be, the
effect on our psychology has been profound – a democratization of
oracular thinking...
Now, in the 21st century, technology has gone a step further,actuallya quantum leap further, with the introduction of immersive interactive 3D virtual worldsandthe
availability of powerful but inexpensive game engines that allow for
accurate and realistic simulations of physical processes thatwere unavailable to any but the wealthiest and educationally privileged groups in advanced economies.
Following
the work of Dr. Jane McGonigal we will explore the argument that
gaming, with its deep application of the principles of positive
psychology and environmental pscyhology to the construction of
emotionally compelling fantasy worlds, is already changing the way we
perceive and conceive of our possibilities and alternatives. And we will
investigate how gamification – the application of these principles to
real world outcomes in education, business and development – can empower
each of us to not just think out loud but to “think out loudest”,
giving us all a voice in the transformation of world so as to create a
desirable future.
Transcript of Video 2, Above: The Relational Summary and Dialectics
Greetings and welcome
to our First Lecture in Environmental Psychology, Gamification and the Quest for
Eutopia .
As you may know, the
principal assignment in this course, the way you get most of your
credit, is through the creation of what we call our 'Relational
Summaries'.
A relational summary
differs from a normal summary in that what we are looking for is the
relationship between the course material and your personal
experience. In the relational summary we use what we are learning
from our textbooks, journal articles and outside readings and
relate the topics to our own lives.
We aren't much
interested in a parroting of the authors whom you have read – we
make the assumption that we all have the books and material available
and that we can read it ourselves. The relational summary is not a
substitute for the assigned reading – it isn't a short cut for
others to pick up the gist of what we are studying, and it certainly
is not merely a way of 'proving' that you have read the material.
The relational summary
is a part of dialectical thinking and communication, which may be the
most important skill you ever learn as a human being.
We see dialectical
skills being important in the current presidential debates and we
treasure in our democracy our ability to be able to participate in
those debates, much as we see in town hall discussions of where we
would like our future to go. This ability for citizens as well as
the political elite to discuss and debate their future is a hallmark
of American democracy and one that is very rare in other countries
around the world. Without it we have dictatorship.
Let's define
dialectical thinking for a moment to make sure we are all on the same
page:
dialectical
thinking:
Dialogical thinking (thinking within more than one perspective)
conducted to test the strengths and weaknesses of opposing points of
view. (Court trials and debates are, in a sense, dialectical.) When
thinking dialectically, reasoners pit two or more opposing points of
view in competition with each other, developing each by providing
support, raising objections, countering those objections, raising
further objections, and so on. Dialectical thinking or discussion can
be conducted so as to "win" by defeating the positions one
disagrees with — using critical insight to support one's own
view and pointing out flaws in other views (associated with critical
thinking in the restricted or weak sense), or fairmindedly, by
conceding points that don't stand up to critique, trying to integrate
or incorporate strong points found in other views, and using critical
insight to develop a fuller and more accurate view (associated with
critical thinking in the fuller or strong sense).
Since dialectical
thinking is analogous to dialogical thinking, let's examine a
definition of that term:
dialogical
thinking:
Thinking that involves a dialogue or extended exchange between
different points of view or frames of reference. Students learn best
in dialogical situations, in circumstances in which they continually
express their views to others and try to fit other's views into their
own.
Simple right? What we
are really after is a dialog. And in the relational summary you
write you are beginning a dialog between the authors you have read
and yourself.
And by posting your
relational summary you invite others – me, you fellow students,
people outside the class if you like – to participate in that same
dialog. You invite others to express their points of view and you try
to see if you can fit the authors views and the views of your peers
into you own.
That is the real
function of all of our assignments.
John Taylor Gatto,
whose book 'Weapons of Mass Instruction” we are reading this
semester, also believes that dialectical thinking is one of the most
important things we can learn or teach. He exhorts us to,
“Teach
children to think dialectically so they can
challenge the hidden assumptions of the world about them, including
school assumptions, so they can eventually generate much of their own
personal curriculum and oversight.”
(http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/18t.htm).
Many of
our problems in the world today come from most of us spending years
in systems that not only didn't encourage dialectical thinking but
punished it. So we don't often get sufficient practice these days
in the ancient art of Socratic dialog.
Another of
our readings this semester, Bernard Suits' “The Grasshopper” is
written in the form of a Socratic Dialog and represents some
dialectical thinking at its best. It gets even better when you
engage with the book and bring the dialog about the game playing
grasshopper and the hard working ants out into our own reality where
it can be discussed with our peers.
I have a
method for creating the right environment for dialogical
argumentation that I use every year here at Mercy. I simplify things
by asking you to do the following:
Each time
you sit down to write your relational summary, take at least three
quotes from the course assigned readings, making note for us of the
pages you found them on, and take at least three quotes from outside
readings that you discovered to be relevant to our topic, in other
words books or readings you “assigned” to yourself, and make
note for us of where you found those ideas so we can find them
ourselves if we want to go deeper. Reproduce those quotes or ideas
from us and then engage in a dialog with those six quotes – or
more, more is always better – by relating them to your own life
experience and opinions and observations.
The
summary that you come up with as you try to relate your life and
opinions to what you have been reading about from other's lives and
opinions is what becomes then a “relational summary”. It makes
the readings something YOU can relate to and in turn becomes
something WE can relate to.
The second
part of the method is for you to involve yourself in a dialog or
discussion with your classmates about the relational summary they
posted. Take on the challenge of engaging with what they have
written. Question their assumptions, provide your own perspective.
Argue your point of view. Throw some new quotes and evidence at them
that either supports or refutes what they have to say.
Don't
worry about being 'right' or 'wrong' in a judicial sense – you will
win no points nor lose points for the opinions you espouse; what we
are looking for is that you back up your arguments with a trail of
evidence that we can all follow – we want to be able to ascertain
what is your personal opinion and what came from others, and we want
to be able to go back and look at the source of those from whom you
drew quotes and ideas. Most of all, we want to see that you can work
with the opinions and ideas of others, give appropriate credit when
credit is due, and that you can make a case for your own ideas and
opinions by backing them up with personal experience.
Since the
relational summary is the dialectical foundation of this course, I
would like to take this opportunity to model for you how it might be
done in my lecture.
In fact, a
lecture usually IS a kind of relational summary. The professor takes
what he or she has read, pulls out relevant quotes and ideas and
builds an argument by relating the literature to his or her own life
experience as a practitioner in the field. So my lectures are
similar to what I expect from you – they are relational summaries.
Normally,
we start with a quote or observation from the literature.
So, for today's
lecture, let's assume that Jane McGonigal is right and that reality
is broken.
Transcript of 15 min Video Lecture Part 1, Above:
Let's assume that Jane McGonigal is right and that reality
is broken.
She compares the way we
perform in our real lives and the way we act in games and says, on
page 4,
“As we make these value judgments, hold moral
debates over the addictive quality of games, and simultaneously
rush to achieve massive industry expansion, a vital point is being
missed. The fact that so many people of all ages, all over the
world, are choosing to spend so much time in game worlds is a sign
of
something important, a truth that we urgently need to recognize. The truth is this: in today's society, computer
and video games are fulfilling genuine human needs that the real
world is currently unable to satisfy. Games are providing rewards
that reality is not. They are teaching and inspiring and engaging
us in ways that reality is not. They are bringing us together in
ways that reality is not.”
“And unless something dramatic happens to
reverse the resulting exodus, we're fast on our way to becoming a
society in which a substantial portion of our population devotes
its greatest efforts to playing games, creates its best memories
in game environments, and experiences its biggest successes in game
worlds.”
One of McGonigal's big
themes is the supposed tragedy of this “mass exodus” to virtual
reality and how to counter it by improving real reality.
But how do we begin to
go about fixing it?
If you went to the
doctor and complained, “doctor, I'm broken” the doctor, assuming
she's any good, isn't simply going to tell you to take two aspirin
and call her in the morning, she will try to determine where and how
you are broken, and from that diagnosis seek the appropriate
treatment.
And so it must be when
treating the ills of reality.
First we have to decide
what parts of reality seem to be 'broken' and define for ourselves
whether we are talking about human society in general, which goes
back tens of thousands of years, or the recent human social and
technological experiment we call “civilization” which goes back
to sometime between 5 and 8000 years ago?
Or was it our
transition from a nomadic hunter gatherer lifestyle , going back
millions of years, and shared with many other animals, to the
sedentary agricultural lifestyle now unique to our species that
created a feeling of being out of step with reality, reality being a
nature to which we are longer well adapted, and that hence led to a
feeling of broken-ness?
These hypotheses, which
suggest a a mismatch between the type of creature the human animal
evolved to be and the environment in which it now finds itself, is
popular in popular literature that explores genetics, Biological
athropology, Evolution and sociobiology.
We find good arguments
for the idea of “man the maladapted animal” in the works of
authors like Desmond Morris, Robert Ardrey, Konrad Lorenz and Erich
Fromm in the 1960s in books like “The Naked Ape” and “The
Terretorial Imperative”, “On Aggression” and “The Anatomy of
Human Destructiveness” and recently in works by geneticist Spencer
Wells and literary author Daniel Quinn in books like “Pandora's
Seed: The Unforseen Cost of Civilization”, “Ishmael” and
“Beyond Civilization”.
The basic argument
about humans being out of step with nature is simplified by Quinn
into the notion of the “leavers” and the “takers”.
Where we went wrong,
Quinn says, is when we decided that we could decide who gets to live
and die. He says on page 239,
"The premise of the Takers' story
is 'The world belongs to man.' ...The premise of the Leavers' story
is 'Man belongs to the world.'"
"For three million years, man
belonged to the world and because he belonged to the world, he grew
and developed and became brighter and more dexterous until one day,
he was so bright and so dexterous that we had to call him Homo
sapiens sapiens-- which means he was
us."
"The Leavers' story is 'the gods
made man for the world, the same way they made salmon and sparrows
for the world. This seems to have worked well so far so we can take
it easy and leave the running of the world to the gods'."
Quinn uses a talking gorilla as the main character who tells humanity
that the “taker” culture has used both religion and science to
justify 'playing God' and to justify acting as if we can do whatever
we want to our environments. He says,
"The story of
Genesis must be undone. First, Cain must stop murdering Abel. This is
essential if you're to survive. The Leavers are the endangered
species most critical to the world - not because they're humans but
because they alone can show the destroyers of the world that there
is more than one right way to live. And then, of course, you must
spit out the fruit of the forbidden tree. You must absolutely and
forever relinquish the idea that you know who should live and who
should die on this planet."
(Another aside: This is
the second quote I'm using in this relational summary, this time from
outside readings not assigned to the course. I'm relating the ideas
from our course readings to ideas from material I have hunted and
gathered myself; this is a key part of the relational summary,
bringing in outside arguments. You can learn more about the ideas in
Quinn's Ishmael from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_%28novel%29;
In this way I'm leaving a paper trail of my sources).
Suggesting that human
culture explains where we went wrong might not be the full answer
though. Not many people in the world want to leave its running “to
the gods”. People started acting as though the world belonged to
them rather than the other way around because many did find life in
'harmony' with nature to be, as Hobbs famously pointed out in his
Leviathan “nasty, brutish and short”.
So despite some
evidence from certain tropical environments favoring the Rousseauian
concept of the Noble Savage living a carefree life in balance with
her surroundings, there is also evidence of great hardship for groups
of people trying to live well while 'belonging to the world'.
So there is another
perspective we might consider. And that is the idea that maybe
Nature itself is “broken”. Maybe the very nature of Nature –
the way the universe in general and the Earth in specific were
created – inevitably leads any intelligent and feeling organism to
feel dissatisfied. In that case reality isn't just broken, but
perhaps was never such a great place to begin with.
Regardless of the level
of reality in which you may find yourself unhappy, identifying the
priority areas is still of the essence, and finding ways to improve
the parts that trouble you most seems to be one of the major tasks
we face in life.
Fortunately, Dr.
McGonigal identifies several areas where she finds reality to be
broken and gives several possible solutions.
In Part 2,
“Reinventing Reality” she quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson saying “All
life is an experiment, The more experiments we make, the better”.
And the experiments she urges us to run, using games as the safest
and most rewarding testing ground, are encapsulated in the following
list, compiled from throughout the book on
http://fragileearthstudios.com/2011/07/11/fixes-for-reality/:
Compared with games, reality is too easy.
Games challenge us with voluntary obstacles and help us put our
personal strengths to better use.
Compared with
games, reality is depressing. Games focus our energy, with
relentless optimism, on something we’re good at and enjoy.
Compared with
games, reality is unproductive. Games give us clearer missions and
more satisfying, hands-on work.
Compared with
games, reality is hopeless. Games eliminate our fear of failure and
improve our chances for success.
Compared with
games, reality is disconnected. Games build stronger social bonds
and lead to more active social networks. The more time we spend
interacting with our social networks, the more likely we are to
generate a subset of positive emotions known as “pro-social
emotions.”
Compared with
games, reality is trivial. Games make us part of something bigger
and give epic meaning to our actions.
Compared with
games, reality is hard to get into. Games motivate us to participate
more fully in whatever we’re doing.
Compared with
games, reality is pointless and unrewarding. Games help is feel more
rewarded for making our best effort.
Compared with
games, reality is lonely and isolating. Games help us band together
and create powerful communities from scratch.
Compared to games,
reality is hard to swallow. Games make it easier to tame good advice
and try out happier habits.
Compared with
games, reality is unsustainable. The gratification we get from
playing games are an infinitely renewable resource.
Compared with
games, reality is unambitious. Games help us define awe-inspiring
goals and tackle seemingly impossible social missions together.
Compared with
games, reality is disorganized and divided. Games help us make a
more concerted effort – and over time, they give us collaborative
superpowers.
Reality is stuck in the present. Games help
us imagine and invent the future together.
McGonigal concludes that “Maybe we should be
treating our reality more like a game.”
However, given limited
time and resources we still need to find a starting point, we need to
pinpoint at least one major area where our daily reality makes us
suffer, and it is important that we identify an area that we have at
least some control over, and apply our fixes there first.
John Taylor Gatto
clearly identifies an area that he believes is central to the problem
and vital to the fix, and that is something that is very close to all
of us, and to a certain extent within our control:
School.
The idea that school
itself could be our chief problem may strike some of you as odd.
Schools are supposed to be something we need more of, not less of,
right? Schools are supposed to be our most important solution to our
problems, right? When we talk about “helping” third world
countries, we talk about building more schools. When we talk about
the path to success we talk about the need for more schooling.
But according to John
Taylor Gatto in “Weapons of Mass Instruction”, schools themselves
may be the very things that are most broken in our reality, and Jane
McGonigal is inclined to agree. And it isn't just a matter of
differentiating between so-called “good schools” and so-called
'bad schools”. According to Gatto it is the very nature of the
institution that makes it rank as the greatest of our problems.
So here is the second
of the three quotes from our assigned readings I want to call
attention to:
“Our “American” schools (both
public and private) are fashioned after the Prussian system of
education. The Prussians were well-known for their regimented society
and their efficient military. “Divide children by subject, by
age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more
subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind,
separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous
whole.” A society divided is a society which cannot find its way.
So it was there in Prussia and still is here in America that we have
a society of people able and willing to take orders.
“Mandatory education serves
children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into
servants.” A society of servants requires a class of leaders.
“One in every five American jobs is
some form of oversight over the behavior of others.”
These quotes come from page xviii of
the “Prolouge: Against School”. More can be found at
http://www.hcsedu.com/BOOK_REVIEWS/Weapons_of_Mass_Instruction/.
The Gatto perspective,
which we should all think through with an open mind, is that our
schools aren't failing. Not by a long shot. The problem is that
they are succeeding too well. How can that be?
Gatto contends that our
schools are succeeding in doing what they were really set up to do,
which is to keep people from being independent creative thinkers and
from being able to compete in the marketplace. In other words,
schools were set up not to help you get a good education, but to put
barriers in the way of you getting a good education.
He gives plenty of good
evidence for the idea that the dysfunction of schools is deliberate,
but even if it weren't, a strong case could be made that the reality
of schools is still broken in the sense that the way schools operate
goes against millions of years of co-evolution between human minds
and the environments we evolved in. The argument that people are
maladapted to the institutional school environment is made most
strongly by J. Gary Bernhard in “Primates in the Classroom: An
Evolutionary Perspective on Children's Education” .
I use Bernhard as the
second of my quotes from unassigned readings that I think are
relevant to the dialectic we are engaging in.
On page 75 Bernhard
reminds us that,
“An interesting
aspect of the context of closeness and cooperation in nomadic
foraging societies is conversation. People seek one another out, keep
up on all the latest news, talk before , during and after the hunt,
tell jokes and tease one another...”
He quotes from the
Anthropologist Tonkinson (1978, 127) who lived among the !Kung
bushpeople of Botswana, saying, “Also characteristic are a
gregariousness, a love of animated discussion and repartee, and a
keen interest in what transpires in all dimensions... [conversation]
keeps up good, open communication among the members of the band;
through its constantly flowing expression it is a salutary outlet for
emotions, and it serves as the principal sanction in social
discipline...”
Transcript of 15 min Video Lecture 1, part 2, Above:
Now contrast that with
the way we treat conversation in schools. We forbid students to talk
'out of turn', forbid them to talk before, during and after the hunt
for knowledge, forbid teasing, animated discussion and repartee, and
we wonder why discipline is always falling apart in such an
environment.
We ignore tens of
thousands of years of the desire to be in a conversation being the
prime attractor for maintaining social decorum and participating in
the social contract observing the golden rule.
The threat in
traditional societies was that if you misbehaved you would be cut out
of the great conversations that humans alone possess the brains to
have. You would be silenced or ostracized. But in school
environments everybody feels punished the minute they walk into the
classroom because they are not allowed to talk freely. For
generations this was the most powerful social sanction you could
impose on a person: deny them the right to free speech.
In fact the American
utopian experiment and our cherished 1st amendment to our
constitution is precisely about guaranteeing this most important
right. Tyranny occurs when the right to speak freely is removed.
Yet ironically in our schools we encourage tyranny on the part of the
teacher and we try to put down the natural rebellion students engage
in to recover their stolen rights. A so called lack of discipline
is usually associated with students trying to be part of any real
conversation, voicing your own views particularly when expressing
unpopular opinions. Good discipline, good school behavior is assumed
to occur when students merely parrot back what the teacher has
permitted you to say and when you follow their prescribed script.
We should also observe
that in a hunter gatherer society the natural environment has not
been dumbed down by reducing the landscape to just a handful of
plants and animals. The natural environment is a place where people
have not been “dummified” by repetitive monocrop agriculture or
factory work (as James Scott from Yale University describes it in
“Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed) ; the environment is so rich that there is
plenty to talk about that immediately creates a so called “teachable
moment”.
In a sufficiently
complex natural environment, merely commenting on what you are seeing
– talking about the weather and commenting on the sounds and sights
and smells your senses are taking in -- becomes a valuable education
in itself. By comparison most classrooms are entirely too dull, and
it is no wonder that whatever students freely talk about is going to
seem off topic. Students in particular and human beings in general
prefer to talk about things relevant to their concerns and survival,
not the sterile and meaningless environment the school system has
provided.
Of course this is hotly
debated with one camp believing that classrooms should be sterile so
that students are not distracted from the message the teacher is
dictating.
For my third quote from
our assigned readings I choose Bell et al.'s Environmental Pscyhology
textbook, page 450 in the section on “learning environments” .
They say,
“Some researchers
believe that classrooms should tend more toward the complex rather
than the simple. Having more stimuli and opportunities for
environmental exploration provides an enriched environment that
facilitates learning. Others disagree, arguing that complex learning
environments are distracting and make it difficult for the student to
concentrate on school work... Of course, classrooms serve more
purposes than just learning content relevant to a specific topic.
They also involve learning how to learn, learning social
responsibility and acquisition of cultural values. Different
classroom environments may facilitate one of these purposes but not
the others. Working for the right fit between pupil and learning
environment is probably the most desirable approach (e.g. Ahrentzen
et al., 1982), a view consistent with adaptation level theory as
presented in chapter 4. Because things change with time, it is
important to evaluate classroom design modifications continually.”
The pointer back to
Chapter 4, “Theories of Environment-Behavior Relationships” and
Adaptation Level Theory on page 110 is a good one because it honors
the fact that for every individual learning is different and for each
there may be “an optimal level of stimulation”. The problem is
that there is no “one size fits all” prescription for schooling
and the danger of schools is that they teach to either the lowest
common denominator, or they teach to the mean, the so called
'average' student, or they break people apart into designated groups
– from so called special education to the suppposedly 'highly
gifted', all of which stigmatize us and injure young people's ability
to integrate their unique skills into society in a way that gives us
all the chance for a happy self actualized life.
McGonigal might argue
that virtual reality now gives us the ability to customize classrooms
for each individual student so that nobody has to suffer through a
learning environment they don't feel comfortable in. We can
customize the manufacture of minds the same way we now customize
consumer products, and nobody has to feel stigmatized.
But if we are still
going to create brick and mortar classrooms, if we are going to
inevitably err in our design of a learning environment by trying to
accommodate a roomful of different people without trying to
homogenize them, then the proper error, some would argue, would be
too look at the types of environments in which the human mind evolved
and create circumstances that at least in some respects are analogous
to those that shaped us.
Bernhard in Primates in
the Classroom analyses the school environment from the perspective of
a nervous system that was honed over millions of years on a planet
where people did talk all the time (talking was the one thing our
species did that set us apart from all the other animals) and in
which the act of sitting still and listening to others talk
uninterrupted occurred mostly at night in dark environments around
the warm glow of a campfire. This was the time of storytelling when
the elders and the wise and most accomplished told their tales to
pass on wisdom to the tribe. The bright light of day saw us on our
feet hunting and gathering in unimaginably complex environments,
searching for materials to build tools and shelters and running from
predators and constantly chattering to one another.
No wonder students
find it hard to sit still and sit quietly in a classroom in the
middle of the day. So long as the sun was up we were mostly up on
our feet and if we were sitting doing productive work, like basket
weaving or clothesmaking or sorting and chipping stones, we were
constantly moving our hands and, more importantly, constantly talking
with one another.
Parents instinctively
know this – we read stories to our children at bedtime just before
lights out, not in the middle of the day, and we discuss our
discoveries and activities around the dinner table.
But school asks us to
go against our entire history of adapting brain and body to the
circadian rhythms that govern our attention structures in complex and
highly stimulating environments. We demand normal night-time
behavior, conditioned over millenia when darkness simplified our
surroundings, during the hours we are most interested in active
motion and exploration and communication.
Is it no wonder, then,
that children find it so hard to cooperate with the artificial
mandate we impose on them to suspend all motion and spontaneous
talking and listen to the shaman like teacher tell stories?
I did an experiment in
my own classroom in the early 1990s with a group of so called
“troublemaker” students. I simply drew the shades, turned out
the overhead lights, put an orange-red light bulb in one corner of
the room, looking like a campfire, and whispered greetings as the
students filed into the classroom. They immediately adopted a hushed
tone and whispered back, “what's going on?” I whispered, “sit
down around me in a circle, I want to tell you a story.” And they
played the game with me. They were quiet yet alert, excited but
calm. I told them about the need to “hunt and gather” for
information that could save our “tribe” from disaster and told
them that when the sun came up we would have to get up and explore
the room for clues to solve a problem I had written on the board. I
said in my whisper “and remember, to solve the problem you HAVE TO
talk to one another, because the clues are scattered throughout the
room and nobody can solve it on their own.”
Then I turned on the
lights and opened the shades and said in a loud voice, “right,
let's get to work!!”
Immediately the
classroom turned into a magical environment for treasure hunting.
After about a half an hour of frantic conversation, working with
microscopes and dissection scopes and books and probes, milling about
with high energy, I drew the shades again, turned out the lights and
went and sat by the “fire”. Almost immediately my students
calmed down, ceased what they were doing and gathered around me,
quieting into a hush. I asked softly, “welcome back to the cave.
It's been a long day hunting and gathering. Let's talk about what you
discovered and see what you brought back to camp...”
This simple but
effective experiment, repeated many times with different groups,
confirmed to me the notion that environment not only powerfully
affects psychology, but that the school environment is unusually
antagonistic to normal human behavior and is thus responsible for
most of the problems that teachers and parents and students all
complain about. Yet almost nobody seems to do much about it.
Over the years I went
further with these experiments in applied environmental psychology –
I started having the students select movie soundtracks to play during
certain lessons, enhancing the teachable moments by treating the
classroom as if it were a landscape in a Hollywood movie and allowing
the students to feel like characters in various adventure and science
fiction stories.
By using music and
visual aids and, with the student's help, an understanding of what
environments their young minds and bodies wanted to be immersed in in
order to learn most effectively, we turned our classroom from a place
of boredom, hostility or goofiness into a place of mystery, adventure
and productive experience. We turned classrooms into spaceships,
jungles, and even a utopian biosphere called Marsville. When we
couldn't make the classroom simulate the environment we wanted we put
students in front of a blue screen and let them see themselves on a
television monitor with whatever fantasy landscape they wanted behind
them.
With a little bit of
Hollywood magic we were able to deal with the broken nature of
reality and use a bit of fantasy imagineering to fix it, at least as
far as how we saw it in our minds eyes.
The year that the
movies 'Deep Impact” and “Armeggedon” came out we researched
the threat of the earth being hit by a meteor, watched scenes from
Hollywood blockbusters and scientific documentaries and set about
learning “survival science”, discussing how we might survive in
shelters, grow food, recycle water, and provide electricity. To
learn to “shoot down” prospective meteors we used a computer game
called 'green globs' that taught the use of quadratic equations to
destroy green spheres in a cartesian coordinate system which we said
represented the meteors. In this way students became enthusiastic
about learning math because it was suddenly relevant to stopping a
real threat – it wasn't algebra, it was 'ballistics'.
Let me go into a
little greater detail about the Green Globs Program.
I used green globs in
my classroom at Hollywood High School's At-Risk Youth Career Academy
in the mid 1990s as a way of teaching math and ballistics to
students. But please note that I was never a math teacher. I
was working with retired Air Force personnel as part of a government
sponsored project to improve math and science to help our armed
forces. I found Green Globs to be the best way to motivate my
students and really give them understanding of applied math but the
mission of our students was not to learn equations that, as they said
so often “we'll never use when we graduate”, the objective was
to work in teams to solve a problem of possible meteors and possible
missiles from space threatening their country. These threats were
represented by the green globs on their “radar screen” - a
cartesian coordinate system that finally had meaning.
We had a big screen
with a projector in the front of the class representing mission
control and a row of computers in the back where team members sat in
groups of two or three trying out quadratic equations from various
text books to see what effect they would have. When they
thought they had a good equation that would knock out the maximum
number of globs with a single shot in their back room simulations,
potentially saving resources and time and ammunition, they
would send a hero up to the front to take the shot against the "real"
menace. Each team had a certain "budget" of
shots.
The program was wildly successful -- students taught
themselves math to cooperate and compete to counter the "threat
from space". They memorized trigonometric functions and
equations for circles and ellipses and point-slope formulas merely
because they wanted to be better heros against the imaginary threat.
We did no teaching of math concepts and no drilling. They simply
played the game in this context and the learning and memorization
came naturally.
By contextualizing the
learning in terms of meaningful fantasy landscapes that had some
connection with reality but was safer than reality, we made serious
learning fun. By making the goal mastery of skills in a
non-threatening environment where failure is not punished or
ridiculed but is a sign that you are pushing your limits, we took all
of the anxiety out of science and math.
As an aside, for the
purposes of our Relational Summaries, note what I've just done here:
I used my discussion of our readings to launch into a very personal
explanation of MY particular experiences as a teacher trying out some
ideas I got from the literature and some that I came up with myself.
In this way my summary of the literature becomes relational to my
life and ideas and opinions, and that is what I want to get from you
too. We aren't interested in hearing once again what we already
read, we want you to take us on a journey into your past, your
present, your experiences, your observations, your experiments, your
trials and errors. We want to learn from YOU! So please do relate
what you are reading to your life.
Transcript of 15 Minute Video Lecture Part 3, Above:
In my life experience,
going back to my early experiences as an inner city teacher deeply
troubled by the chaos in the classroom, what we did back in the late
80's and 90's when I was working with so-called 'at risk students'
in South Los Angeles, was “gamify” the classroom. Back then we
didn't have that word for it. But now “Gamification” is seen by
more and more people, from corporate leaders to educational leaders,
as one of the best ways to make work and learning relevant, effective
and fun.
Even the Wharton School
of Business at the University of Pennsylvania teaches a course on
“gamification” that explores how game elements can be used to
improve the way we do things.
Privileged kids have
almost always been given the chance to gamify their learning
experiences, have almost always been permitted and encouraged to
tailor their educations to their own particular learning styles, to
bring their passions and excitements into the learning environment.
If ways of capturing intrinsic motivations for learning a subject
were not provided in school they were inevitably provided by family,
friends or community. The question as far as school in general
goes is, “can we really make learning environments that make
learning meaningful and fun for everyone? Or is this impossible to do
within the standardizing school environment?”
Jane McGonigal, author
of Reality of Broken, takes things further than gamification. She
doubts the efficacy of trying to take our school curriculum and
merely create “educational games” and new point systems and
rewards and incentives from the outside in. She suggests that merely
gamifying the workplace or the school environment fails to capture
the essence of what we need to do to fix things in our world.
There are many other
critics of gamification who argue persuasively that we are going
about it in the wrong way.
Is gamification really the magical process that
so many believe it to be? Many critics would argue against it, saying
this process merely cheapens and distracts from the learner’s
experience.
Look around you – elements of video games are
creeping into many of your daily activities. Have you booked a flight
recently on Trip
Advisor? Commented on a Huffington
Post article? New ways of “earning badges” and “unlocking
achievements” are cropping up every day. But does the ability to
earn a badge automatically increase our engagement in an activity?
Game designer and consultant Margaret
Robertson doesn’t think so. In a recent blog post speaking out
against the term ‘gamification’, Robertson wrote, “What we’re
currently terming gamification is in fact the process of taking that
thing that is least essential to games and representing
it as the core of the experience. Points and badges have no closer a
relationship to games than they do to websites and fitness apps and
loyalty cards. They’re great tools for communicating progress and
acknowledging effort, but neither points nor badges in any way
constitute a game.”
“Gamification is
the wrong word for the right idea. The word for what’s happening at
the moment is pointsification. There are things that should be
pointsified. There are things that should be gamified. There are
things that should be both. There are many, many things that should
be neither.” Margaret Robertson
You may be tempted to jump on board and trade
your grades in for badges and call it a game. But this simple act
doesn’t dramatically change the learner’s experience. Take some
time to really understand what makes a good game great. Create a
compelling narrative to pull your students through the course. Set up
mentoring and collaboration opportunities such as those you encounter
in games to enable learners to share what they know. And frequently
chime in with feedback. Use those badges to chart progress, but
meaningful instructor feedback is what will truly propel the learner
forward.
“Gamification, by
contrast, doesn’t rely on internal motivation. Instead, it’s
using the oldest tricks in the book: providing instantaneous
feedback, egging on the competition, and rewarding even tiny steps of
progress. Gamification assumes that the player isn’t especially
motivated – at least at the beginning – and then provides barrels
of incentives to ramp up that motivation.” Elizabeth Corcoran
This is something that
true game designers would never do because the essence of a good
game, as pointed out by Bernard Suits in his analysis of what makes a
good game in 'The Grasshopper”, and echoed throughout “Reality
is Broken”, is that good games are AUTOTELIC ACTIVITIES (see pages
45 and 46 for a good definition of that term) that tap into our
INTRINSIC reward system. Gamers don't play games to earn points, or
money, or fame, or to get candy bars, though all those things may
occur. They play games because it is fun, because it feels good,
because they want to, and often they will continue even when they are
threatened or punished for playing. By contrast schools, no matter
how many extrinsic rewards are offered from the outside, are usually
places of compulsory attendance. The high truancy rates attest to
the deep structural flaws in their design.
So gamifying school
environments with more extrinsic rewards can not really tap into the
intrinsic motivations that make all mammals naturally want to play
and play and play, all the while preparing themselves through play
for the serious business of survival. A dog will chase a ball or a
stick whether you give him a treat or not because it is wired to find
it fun. Eventually the dog will use that skill to catch a rabbit, but
as a puppy it plays merely because it is fun. So in this sense pure
games, properly designed may be a better way to prepare humans for
gaining real survival educations than some school curriculum beefed
up with flashy point systems and 3D characters.
The subtitle of
McGonigal's book is “Why Games Make Us Better and How they Can
Change the World” and the essence of her argument is that games
themselves have the power to transform reality for the better. In
many cases games today “previsualize” what an alternative reality
might look like. The detailed fantasy landscapes are immersive and
interactive and whether they depict a utopian or a dystopian past or
future, a version of the world as it was, or is, or could be, they
give players a certain “agency”, and ability to interact with and
make changes to the reality around them. This is itself is more
empowering than the normal artforms and media that people used to
depict different versions of the world.
Also, when playing
MMORPGs or “massively multiplayer online role playing games”,
gamers are learning organically how to cooperate with strangers to
'level up'. McGonigal argues that far from being mere 'shoot 'em up'
competition, a wide variety of games today reveal to the players the
real-life advantages of working together and solving common problems.
McGonigal argues that
we could and should design more games that overtly concern making a
better world, such as her “urgent evoke” and “world without
oil” games, but she also argues that the rewards systems and
meaning systems of games, and their ability to keep people focused on
difficult challenges without punishing 'failure' stands in complete
contradistinction from the way schools and work environments are run.
In the latter there is constantly anxiety to succeed and one false
step can have terrible consequences. In the former, in the game
environment, we follow Thomas Edison's advice, “if you aren't
making at least 10 mistakes a day you aren't learning fast enough”
and honor Albert Einstein's comment “I failed my way to success”.
Game design inherently makes challenges fun and encourages
investment in that which is difficult. School and jobs seem too
often to do the opposite.
We can try to “gamify”
real schools and jobs with different incentive structures, but there
may be something deeper about these environments that prevents any
amount of reform from having real impact, and this is a point that
Gatto tries to hammer home.
Gatto, after 30 years
of teaching in some of the toughest schools in the nation, concludes
that schools were not created to help people succeed, they were
created to maintain the illusion of a democracy and meritocracy while
enslaving minds to a sinister Pavlovian conditioning of bells and
schedules that rewards only those who are obedient and confine their
thinking within narrow parameters proscribed by the elites in charge
of maintaining a hierarchical order. In Gatto's experience, any
school that really starts producing a majority of critical people who
can truly think for themselves and realize that they can learn far
more on their own than they could in an institution seals its own
doom.
And if this is so, then
trying to fix a school with gamification would be like changing the
hubcaps and tires on a car and giving it a new paint job without
replacing the faulty engine.
If Reality is indeed
broken, meaning that there are structural problems with our society,
with our environments and even with our own human nature that make
life more difficult and unfair than we would like it to be, then mere
gamification might be likened to cosmetic changes when the only way
to solve these problems for sure would be to create new structures
and test them out. But because of the inherent risks in replacing
one reality with another, the tests, or experiments, can't easily be
done in the real world.
They need to and can be
done in games.
But if we can try out
alternate realities in games, with low risk, low transaction costs,
no threats of social disruption or harm to the player, the community
or society, and if these alternative realities turn out to be
superior to what we see in reality, then the argument would be “why
do we need the practices and institutions in reality to stay the way
they are?”
Why couldn't games
replace school? Why couldn't games replace work?
If we can show that
through gaming people can learn better and faster, if we can show for
example that playing Green Globs with your friends can give you a
better understanding of quadratic equations and cartesian coordinate
space and graphs, why would you go back to using a textbook? Why
would you get up early and go through the sleet and snow on a cold
winters day to catch a bus to arrive in a room before a bell rings
risking getting “in trouble”, just to have a person stand in
front of you with an ancient technology like chalk and a chalkboard,
writing incomprehensible symbols on the board, where you may feel
embarrassed to ask a question lest you lose face or social rank, when
you could sit home in a warm bed with a cup of tea and your laptop
playing green globs, or when you could go to the community center or
public library and join a gaming group cooperating to save the world
from space aliens using mathematical formulas?
If we can show that
through gaming you can do your job better and more efficiently, if we
can show, for example, that playing SimCity Societies you can balance
a budget better and improve roads and transportation while keeping
your citizens happy, or that by participating in the game “Fold-It”
you can help solve protein configuration problems that have been
stumping biochemists for centuries and with friends from around the
world “design new protein shapes and actively help cure diseases”,
why would you be content going to a job where part of your energy and
time and much of your salary was wasted in the commute, another large
portion wasted in on-job politics and conformance to dress codes and
other social norms, and even more wasted through the inefficiencies
created by fiefdom obsession over secrecy and proprietary
information? Why wouldn't you develop and sell your skills to
cutting edge firms who see the win-win value of crowd sourcing and
collective intelligence in a new global on-line marketplace that uses
virtual reality as an integral part of its work skill portfolio?
The fact is that the
military and the scientific and engineering communities, as well as
economists, have been using computer simulations and various game
theories and approaches to do serious work for decades. Real
soldiers use combat simulations – games – to learn serious
techniques and strategies at almost no cost and without the risk of
injury or death, pilots of course use flight simulators to learn how
to fly real aircraft, Astronauts train in simulators before going
into space, and even doctors today train in virtual reality before
refining their skills on real patients.
And while simulations
get ever more faithful to reality as we model the physical, chemical,
biological and social interactions with greater accuracy, we also
learn from games and our ability to distort physics and defy the laws
of the real universe how we might change things to make the outside
world a little more to our liking.
Games like Spore enable
the public to participate in nurturing the evolution of imaginary
life forms (and in the process learn quite a bit about natural
selection, artificial selection and evolutionary processes) but
genetic engineers are also using simulations to see if they can
improve upon the designs found in nature without threatening our
natural systems while the kinks are being worked out.
And that is the
greatest advantage of games – in them failure has few costs and has
overwhelming advantages, so gamers are encouraged to fail. This
acceleration this provides for learning and improving can not be
overemphasized.
For if there is one
thing that is truly broken about reality, about our schools, our
jobs, our social life, our policies and planning and our
international relations – if there is one thing that is truly
broken about nature itself on this planet or any other in our
universe, it is that failure creates fear. And when we fear to fail,
we cannot truly learn. Trial without error leads nowhere.
So the simplest fix for
all of reality and its woes is to create environments where we can
control the consequences of failure, and make it safe for each
individual to learn by making their own mistakes and level up at
their own pace.
We now have designs and
technologies that enable us to do that, and that is much of what this
course is about.
(The full lecture with graphics, 45 minutes long, for review, is below)
Improving our environment brick by brick, solar panel by solar panel
Instructor T.H. Culhane and the Zabaleen teachers and students of Cairo in front of their home built solar hot water system in the "garbage recycling community" of Manshiyat Nasser
T.H. Culhane (shown above in Athens, Greece, by the poster to the movie "Stealth" which he contributed vocal music to while working with his friend,composer Brian Transeau) lived in Egypt, Germany and the United States where he founded "Solar Cities".
Referring to Herman Daly's comments on the sustainability of Spaceman Economies and Cowboy Economies, we are committed to Boulding and Fuller's notions of helping to maintain "spaceship earth" as a viable home. Thus
T.H. completed his Ph.D. at UCLA in Urban Planning looking at issues surrounding microeconomic analysis of demand for hot water technologies. Ultimately it is hoped that this will help address implementation challenges for Solar Energy Policy while helping create an Environmental Economics Institute at AUC and a Sustainability Center at Mercy College in New York, in partnership with mentor professors (among them Randall Crane and Lois Takahashi (UCLA Institute of the Environment and UCLA Urban Planning) Jeff Miller (AUC Biology),Salah Arafa (AUC Physics) Tarek Selim (AUC Economics) Salah El Haggar (AUC Engineering) Nick Hopkins (AUC Anthropology) and Moshira Hassan (AUC Marine Ecology)
