majority.
practice for creating
One of the continuous challengesprofessionally relevant sKills”
for all societies is to examine how abstract thinking and use of co-design and problem-based learning (PBL) methods can be made more acces
sible to people with disabilities. The successful achievement of Media Lab graduates might falter if graduates lack the collaborative skills they need to solve the complex and ill-defined problems of professional life.
In response to these challenges, “Media Lab methodology” is a practice for creating professionally relevant skills. Instead of a direct assimilation of information, students construct knowledge by solving problems with peers and partners in a community of practice.
The history of the Internet is replete with innovations that do not origi
nate from companies, but from collaborating individuals, in which ideas spread through a grassroots network of early adopters and tinkerers before the moment when entrepreneurs and investors appeared to figure out how to make money from these ideas. Free and open-source software was there already in the 1970s, but corporations and manufacturers only ‘got the message’ in the late 1990s.
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Over the years much innovation has taken place and now, in 2014, forty-three years after the first email, which twenty-two-year-old Tomlinson sent to himself in 1971, we are experiencing an era of social media utilized by three billion Internet users of all sorts4. We know that our students are smart enough to make technology do what they want rather than what its origina
tor intended. They exercise “an idea or a gadget, pushing it past its current limits, reinventing it and eventually paving the way for entrepreneurs who figure out how to create mainstream versions of their novel ideas”.
Linux (aka GNU/Linux), Homebrew Computer Club and Worldwide Web are interesting because they did not start with the profit motive. Rath
er, they started with interesting problems and with people who wanted to solve them; they were exercising technology to its fullest because exploring new ideas is fun5 .
However, we should never be satisfied with ICT and social media per se;
the journey toward expertise progresses through convenient apportioning of novel requirements. Professionals with disabilities seldom have a true opportunity to affect any long-term decisions on ICT use. Thus, as educators we are misguided if we focus on tools and finances instead of the process of learning and the flow where a student figures out their personal mis
sion: Our task is to collaborate with our students who construct their own identity, abilities and knowledge.
Nevertheless, the time between research-lab, cutting-edge prototypes and state-of-the-art consumer products and post-graduate practice is much shorter than at the beginning of the information age; it’s even shorter than at the beginning of the Media Lab era.
The old simplicities of teaching and learning are changing because more and more people are able to collaborate and coordinate their actions in groups that cross both national and ethnic borders and physical bounda
ries. The lab’s faculty has an opportunity to induce all of the stakeholders in question to enhance collaboration, to improve the Media Lab and to facilitate the inclusion of all people in society.
The threat is that scattered and diverse groups may upend the whole evi
dence based, formal education system or even abandon official instruction in favor of self-created informal material, using the very same social media.
However, the good news trumps the bad news due to the fact that both
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opportunities and the threats to them rely on the growth of social media that are open and accessible to everyone and thus ideal for communal ac
tivity.
The philosopher’s stone is not hidden in the Media Lab. It is simply the ability to understand this change, which offers tools to avoid the threats and enemies lurking in the shadows and instead take advantage of the great opportunities that the Media Lab offers for expanding and inclusive col
laboration.
References
Bush, V. 1945. As We May Think. Atlantic (July). http://www.theatlantic.
com/doc/194507/bush (accessed October 19, 2010).
Cavalli-Sforza, L. L. 2001. Genes, Peoples, and Languages. London: Penguin Press Science.
O’Reilly, T. 2009. O’Reilly Insights: Where Real Innovation Hap
pens. Don’t Look for the Gilded Road to Fortune. Look for Passion. http://
www.forbes.com /2009/02/03/innovation-tim-oreilly-technology
breakthroughs_0203oreilly.html (accessed October 19, 2010).
Raike, A. 2006. “Searching Knowledge: CinemaSense as a Case Study in Collaborative Production of a WWW Service in Two Universities.” In K.
Miesenberger, J. Klaus, W. Zagler, and A. Karshmer, eds., Computers Helping People with Special Needs, 568–74. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computers Helping People (ICCHP), Linz, Austria, July 12–14. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin: Springer.
— — — , and K. Hakkarainen. 2009. “Concept Maps in the Design of an Accessible CinemaSense Service.” Art, Design, and Communication in Higher Education 8(1): 27–55. doi: 10.1386/adche.8.1.27/1.
Tomasello, M. 2000. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
FuTuRE
might be good business, but games can also have a negative effect on people.
The current crop of so-called free to play or F2P games have been widely criticized for targeting underage players and finding various ways of entic
ing them to pay in order to progress in the game.
That’s a thing Perttu Hämäläinen has been thinking about recently:
should he open his mouth in public about what’s happening with gam
ing companies? It’s a tricky situation, because they are his main research partners and without them it would be easy to get confined to a remote corner of academia. Thus far he’s been content to focus on more produc
tive aspects of research instead of the psychology of monetization in