#ds106 "Disruptive Wonder" for Growth- Week One in Retrospect

Headless #ds106 has, as artist and designer Kelli Anderson puts it, "opened a humble backdoor into understanding a reality that is infinitely surprising." In one week, Headless #ds106 Bootcamp has challenged me to create daily, take risks, find my visual voice and digital identity, and fearlessly build my personal cyberinfrastructure so I can share my story with those who care to hear it. With 15 more weeks to go, I've got so much to learn, overcome and create! Reflection is necessary for growth, and encouraged in #ds106 participants, so here's my week's experiences as I faced bootcamp head on!

After I tattoed #ds106 on my arm, the most important lessons I learned this week are to:

1.) Continue to create my personal cyberinfrastructure, an expression coined by Gardner Campbell. 

2.) Disrupt, as Kelli Anderson urges, the "order that doesn't deserve my respect" through the creation of my personal cyberinfrastructure. 

3.) Leverage my personal cyberinfrastructure to create order out of life's chaos.

4.) Play, laugh, be goofy because life is way too short! 

5.) Daily create art for creation's sake. 

Sergeant Headless commanded #ds106 recruits to watch 3 videos during our initiation week, among them Kelli Anderson's Disruptive Wonder for Change. 

             

Headless Sarge asked us to think about:

What is disruptive wonder? What did you get out of the designs she shows? 

Disruptive wonder as defined by Kelli is the ability to see the hidden talents in everyday things and to confound the expectations we have of these small everyday objects and situations. When we repurpose or make small things that come "out of left field", we are "reassessing our complacent expectations about reality".  DS106's Daily Creates do just that! These exercises challenge us to use technology to create, re-contextualize, repurpose, remix, redefine, explore the "everyday" to make art for ourselves and for others to enjoy. By experimenting with various media, sharing and connecting on social networking platforms we experience a "surprising reality" of our lives. 

I enjoyed the makeshift record player invitations, the designs for the environmentally conscious popsicle truck, etc., but I was left disruptively wondering...

What if Kelli Anderson, and people in her position, "tinkered with the everyday" to disrupt "the order that doesn't deserve our respect" in those institutions that undermine, sabotage and kill our creativity and "exert an invisible authority over our brains" everyday in subtle, yet destructive ways.  For example, what if, as Kelli states, "we did something better with the basic pieces of our experience" to achieve education reform. We have a so called participatory culture because of technology, but are we leveraging all of its potential to bring about radical ed reform. 

So what if we could make art and engage in some subversive fun by:

• Designing a bogus standardized test, emailing it to school leaders, and demanding they pass it, or else they lose their positions. 
• Or, much like Kelli's intriguing phone calls to paper vendors, what if we called public schools across the country to ask school leaders: 

1. ...if they've been nice to their teachers on a particular day. 
2. ...if they recognize the worth of their teachers, and 
3. ...if they are helping students to discover their hidden talents. 

Kelli's "Believability Team" could become "The Morale Checkers Group"or "The Critical Thinking Enforcers!" Imagine uploading the telephone conversations to Soundcloud! 

Flash mobs stopping traffic as public service announcements about any of society's ills could also work...you never know, check out the link?! 

Aren't greeting cards, wedding invitations, ice cream trucks, and fake newspapers just mild disruptors of authority? Could we pull off radical acts of disruptive wonder for change to achieve all different types of reform?  

How can disruptive wonder of change improve the quality of life for hundreds, thousands or millions of people? Here's a real life example that's changing the lives of children. The bogus paper made international news, but then what? It's all highly creative, but is it disruptive? What changed for the better as a result of these exercises in disruptive wonder? Isn't change for the better what we want through these subversive acts? 

In terms of this learning experience, the video is fitting because it helps us think of why and how we need to "think outside the box", and the potential of cultivating ideas by examining the absurdity of some of society's rules. Kelli is recognized for her highly creative ability to do this. Yet, so many of us may be afraid to be creative, or never bother to explore that aspect of ourselves. She's telling us to think about our individual potential to be disruptive in small yet significant ways. Sometimes we avoid thinking of alternatives, or the hidden talent in the ordinary because it requires us to move out of comfort zone,  or even scarier yet, to be different and stand out among the crowd. Humans are weird that way; we prefer to do what everybody else is doing, and deal with what's familiar and known. Luckily there are people who are not afraid to be different. Kelli Anderson, just like this ds106 experience/ event, is not afraid of being different. She's encouraging us to try to "do something better by doing something unexpected" and seemingly absurd. Ultimately, it's up to us to discover how the unexpected and absurd should not be overlooked or dismissed in effecting change for the better. 

Opportunities like ds106 are moving us in the direction to challenge the status quo in education, but instead of calling it disruptive wonders of change, many aspects of our society first need disruptive wonders for growth. Headless ds106 is a disruptive wonder for "growth" project. It's experimental nature is helping participants gradually spread the word worldwide that learning can be headless for self directed learners willing to take risks, and we need not be afraid to move out of our comfort zones. There are still many growing pains as people get used to the idea of a headless learning experience, so it will take time for change to occur. 

Headless Sarge also encouraged us to consider why art is important after listening to art critic Robert Hughes

                            

Hughes' belief that only children have the ability to create and see art unburdened by society's expectations reinforced some of the same themes presented in Kelli Anderson's "The Disruptive Wonder of Change". Hughes' opinion about the absurdity of the avant-garde movements of the 60s and 70s supported Anderson's concept of disruptive wonder in the sense that many modern art movements created art that was expected to be countercultural but in their attempt to "confound expectations", these artists conceded to the "complacent expectations of that time period's reality." They created art that avoided feeling and conformed to expectations. Hughes tells us art is important when it genuinely evokes feeling which passes to meaning enabling viewers to "mediate between a sense of history and the experience of the world." "The lost paradise that art wants to give back to us as adults not children" is this relationship between feeling and meaning. 

And one more...consider the style and message about creativity in his RSA Animate video by Stephen Johnson from his book Where Ideas Come From 

     

I wondered why Steven Johnson's question about what are the spaces that have historically led to unusual rates of creativity and innovation is not one asked within the educational community more often. Of course, people talk about innovation in education all the time but our educational bureaucracies spend their time planning, "paralysis through analysis", instead of creating and innovating. Bureaucracies have no interest in innovation. The danger is we don't have 10, 20, 30 years to wait for an idea to catch on. By that time, an entire generation has been "moronitized", and then they "moronitize" the next. 

The video's style and message also helped me think about my own creative process, and how good ideas need time to incubate, and how I can use technology to build my creative spaces, or personal cyberinfrastructures. He talks about the patterns he's discovered in environments that are unusually innovative and what he's found is that ideas usually emerge as slow hunches which then collide with smaller hunches to form the big innovative ideas that bring about change. Sometimes people have half an idea and stumble upon the other half serendipitously. I find that it also depends on the individual. Steve Jobs comes to mind. Some individuals are born visionaries, and are gifted at seeing the potential of even the smallest ideas.      

More Questions for Reflections posed by Sergeant Headless: 

• How well do you feel you completed the requirements of the week's assignments?

I had fun completing this week's assignments with the exception of Saturday's challenge which I had no time to do. I plan to catch up tomorrow. I kept up throughout the week because my creative juices were flowing! I didn't let the fact that I can't draw keep me from creating. I didn't feel intimidated, embarrassed or judged by my inability to draw. I just put my dailycreates out there because the ds106 community made me feel welcomed and safe to take this type risk.    

• What gave you trouble? What did you enjoy most? What did you learn?

Time is always a factor. It's been a challenge to make the time to learn the digital tools to create, and then write blog posts about the production process. Nevertheless, I have enjoyed every aspect of daily creates, from production to sharing, but I admit I've neglected some people and responsibilities in F2F life to fully dedicate my time to my digital life. I learned how to make basic GIFs this week, how to use OneTrueMedia to edit existing video and add images. I also learned that there's hope to learn to draw!  

• What would you do differently? What questions do you have?

I need to consider creating a separate blog on Wordpress or Tumblr dedicated solely to #ds106 so I can learn all of the features, create categories and an "About Me" page. I also need to create a Soundcloud account. I have lots of questions about how to create sophisticated GIFs, video editing and badges like Talky Tina's for my fraingers. I asked her today, and she was very nice and said she would. I need to make time to read the ds106 handbook where I'll learn about more of the tools and will probably find answers to a lot of my production questions.  

I also need to remember to include the process I used to create a product and include a narration of the story behind it and my inspiration. I think I did that for the most part for all of my dailycreates this week. 

• What are some of the larger issues surrounding your work? Cultural/Societal implications?

The largest issues surrounding my work are being pressed for time and unfamiliarity with the digital tools to create a better, polished product. Can't think of any cultural or societal implications except my strong opinions about the need for educational reform...

DS106 has been a pleasurable disruption in my life! 

I'm ready to go head on with Bootcamp Week 2!