Free to Browse: Organic Contexts for Tech and Media Literacy
Free to Browse: Organic Contexts for Tech and Media Literacy. Drawing from my family's experience as educational refugees (we have had to move countries twice to be able to legally homeschool and allow our two geeky programmer kids to further self-organize their learning) and my media expertise, I want to explore organic learning contexts based on autonomy and curiosity, that bring out the best in all individuals involved, no matter their age, and help bridge generational gaps. I believe we should let young minds have their digital freedom today and stop locking them up in age-restricted ghettos. Surveillance and authoritarian parental controls are detrimental for bonding, self-discovery, developing technical chops and out-of-the-box creativity (all pretty valuable assets in the fast-paced digital age) and only reinforce ignorance, rigidity and vulnerability in the long run.
The No Ghetto Manifesto
Institutions resist change. Their main goal being efficiency, institutions only run as well oiled machines once we are somehow subdivided into categories, tagged, rated and ranked. Institutions treat individuality as a nuisance, sometimes even as a hazard. This way, institutionalization perpetuates segregation. We can never overcome racism or any other sort of “shapism” if our education continues to be based on obedience and ranking. We have arrived at the point where tech can provide cheap access to the world’s pool of accumulated knowledge and drive active, inclusive civic participation for all individuals, on a deeply personalized level. This is an ode to the emerging digital democracy, to the internet of beings, to deinstitutionalizing society and to the new formula for success, based on meaningful, fulfilling and sustainable daily life.
Joyfully Sorting Out the Disorder
What is self-directed learning? Why are unschooling and self-directed learning the future of education? And what does this have to do with entropy, chaos theory and the formula for intelligence?