Redesigning education at Digital Shoreditch

This month Jon and I ran a session at Digital Shoreditch: Redesigning education for the connected economy. We started off with this slide and it's a quote I keep coming back to. It’s not about educating, it’s about learning. We learn from having experiences, tough times, doing new things, feeling something and working with great (and not so great) people. We shared stories around these ideas to reframe the session around learning.

You can view the rest of our slides here...

[slideshare id=48325205&doc=digitalshoreditch-150519093905-lva1-app6891]

The hands-on part of our workshop was designed around the idea of Mash Ups. Mash-ups is a collaborative ideation method that helps you generate new ideas by combining different elements of two different things together. So firstly, we brainstormed platforms and concepts around "traditional education", coming up with things like books, classrooms and exams. We then brainstormed around "connected economy", coming up with things like podcasts, meet ups and Ted Talks.

We tasked participants with this problem and this challenge. Most of us begin our life as learners. At some stage in our life we stop learning regardless of how much we know. What does this mean for the school of tomorrow?

Next, participants rapidly combined elements from those different areas to create new ideas. One team mashed up teachers and meet-ups to create a meet up where teachers teach students. Another mashed quietness and nodes to create meditation lesson.  One team mashed up podcasts and classrooms to create a silent learning 'disco'.

Our favourite check out was : "I'm going to go back to work and set up a meet up where students teach teachers"

A big thanks to Digital Shoreditch for having us and thank you to everyone who came along!