Free culture aware educators in art and design education
Ricardo, Ana, ginger, Julien, Jaron, Femke, Stephanie, Frederic, Eric
Meeting at Variable, Brussels. 2014-02-04
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Description meeting LGM2014 http://lgru.pad.constantvzw.org:8000/182
Notes Madrid (LGM2013) http://lgru.pad.constantvzw.org:8000/177
Initial listing of participants Madrid meeting http://lgru.pad.constantvzw.org:8000/145

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Some tactics for inserting Free Culture methods in education

*Mixing levels (different years)
*Publishing your work (both students and teachers)
*shared wiki, federated wiki, git, mailinglist, irc
*a testimonial about PZI wiki -- students step into history
*mixed feelings: walled garden also protects you; publishing can be inhibiting; performance anxiety. Dealing with what is already there. Complicated!
*Ask students to propose themes they want to explore
*Exchange between students/teachers in different courses
*Grading
*Self-grading (works great!! / doesn't work ;-))
*Double blind peer grading (game theory!). Criteria, granular, agreement
*No grading (ie. giving the same grade to everyone)
*Algorithmic/software grading (FAT) *Constant Macabre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macabre_constant )
*Mixing different types of education: workshops etc. in other spaces
*Playing with visiblity/invisibility: Teaching other stuff than you actually are told to (renaming, hiding, guerilla). But: scaling problems
*Creating a F.A.Q. together. The most frequently asked question gets treated in next class
*Create a document like: Design patterns for hackerspaces: http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Design_Patterns  document about dealing with frequent problems... common problems and 'good' solutions. A general help for people. Mistakes to avoid.
*Making mistakes
*In case you need to teach proprietary software: Bring free software practices to proprietary software! Example: Creating/documenting bugs for proprietary software, and report a bug to Adobe support forums... trying to get a phonenumber and license number to contact support. PS: this might make you leave school; also be aware of licensing issues that a school does not want to get exposed
*To learn together how to make bug reports
*Teaching command line
*Teachers and students learning together
*Olia Lialina: inviting students to abuse software, to use it in other ways
*Stickering over any Adobe advertising you find.
*Learning by flocking. Grading by flocking?

"Tactics for injecting Free Culture into *"

Plan for Leipzig meeting

Steph: Next session how to make the network live again ... something is not working (yet). Maybe being embedded in 80c is a problem? Maybe move to Relearn?

We agree that minimum need is web presence maybe? People, courses, links. Blogs, wiki ... a planet!

Possible hosts, locations:
http://eightycolumn.net ? Eric: is troubled with reference to plain txt culture :-)
http://www.relearn.be -> new/unstable software (domain is now down)
http://www.ustensile.be -> has a mediawiki already (site is now down)
http://f-lat.org -> has a dokuwiki

A wiki or an html page? Planet needs relevant content. ginger + ricardo do not run blogs for teaching so rss does not make much sense for them.

A page connected to a mailinglist. For people not in FLOSS mailinglist too hard to use?
Static + RSS + updated through mailinglist A pad?

Julien + Femke will set up something before April 2014
Femke: commits to support the network for a year, or until LGM 2016 ;-)

After some discussion we decide to set up a page on http://eightycolumn.net that reads from relearn.be etherpad lite (export html from it). Julien does it with advice/help from steph and eric.

Contacts with schools close to Leipzig? Send people an invitation mail, when you might discover someone doing simular things.

Definition  might grow over time; people might not recognize themselves as such;  means we need to ask people as well. Especially in case people use  invisibility/visibility tricks.

Make it clear on page how you could invite/add yourself.

Before LGM:
*set up site (julien, femke)
*resend invitation with plan for meeting to mailinglists: CREATE, 80c, house, lgru (others?) and url (ginger)
*Ask people to update/add their infos on site
Meeting itself:
*make a round of proposing tactics (serving both getting an overview and adding to list of tricks, ideas): If FLOSS changes ideas of education. How to bring these tactics/methods/ideas into institutional spaces?

A website listing all Free Culture Educator initiatives?
*Producing legitimacy at our institutions (do we need this?)
*"I am not the only one"
*A label? Funny! Certified Free Culture Aware Educator. What about students/teachers?

Curriculum sprint?
Methodology vs. subject
Sharing curricula
  -> How unified would this curricula be? Is there only one?
  -> Different assignments, elements, modules
  -> Is curriculum too big a word? We all have very different visions on education/teaching (and learning?)

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DISCUSSION

Jaron: academy commons = good resource! http://www.edu-factory.org/wp/european-meeting-of-university-struggles-program/

Ricardo: "Problem" of it being too much defined as art/design and discussed on a  media-arts list? Free culture aware educators could be broader than that. There are specific issues, but it should not end at that.

Jaron: Talking to an engineering school ... they seemed closer to my ideas than art/design
ginger: Information studies, communication as well.

Jaron: asking about use of term education (vs learning)
Education is top down
Learning is researching and findind things together
Institutional limits to accept learning
The problem with grading systems; reducing all to numbers in the end
Julien: using consensus to decide the grade?

FLOSS and education are linked. You learn to learn. Network, software, learning
Self-education with code reading and software using are already built-in Free Software users.

Stephanie: Starting at ERG presented Summerschool and did not know how to bring those ideas, methods into the institution. 

Discussing grading and how it definise learning situations. How to get around it?
In Spain: no grants if you are under 6.5 so I make sure you stay above
Bologna system is a problem

How can school be like a "software library"?

Different cultures in FLOSS. Comparing Scribus' introducing Andreas Vox: "He's too smart, so nobody can contribute to what he does". You can make other decisions about tapping into skills, materials that are more accesible.

Different interfaces in software ... how to imagine/map all levels at work. Can you make a learning situation that allows you to understand better? Can you learn how to understand 

Is teaching learning how to debugging yourself (Frederic)? Needing to learn where the problem!

Frederic: FLOSS is about "doing", not because people tell you what to do (reputation). We need a structured system of knowledge. But surveillance ...

Or creating other types of learning/education altogether. Can circumvent grading?
Now education seen as a tool to go into society. When you graduate you have technical merit.
Can you design alternative routes (diplomas defined in different ways), outside institutions?
Julien: today maybe forget about diploma's altogether (specifically in field of art and design)?
Julien: great people we know because of what they do and not because of the school they went through. It is more important who you meet, your network.
Eric: Kobe Matthys - one script in artschool is how to be an author. 
You learn the unwritten rules of how to be an artist just by going to art school.

Jaron: Material conditions, vocabulary are also conditioning who you are. A space.

Julien: so it means we need to set new contexts?

Eric: There are FLOSS tools that have fixed divisions between users and developers; not much different than traditional, proprietary software. But if you use libraries etc. it gets more productive.