Want To Come Along on a Learning Prototrip?

Anyone who has been part of the HASTAC network of networks--or even if you've just been peeking in occasionally to see what we're up to now--knows that we don't do things the usual way.  In fact, when deans at Duke came to us and asked our HASTAC Central team, with our headquarters over in the Franklin Humanities Institute, if we would come up with a new kind of preprofessional Master's degree that exemplified a new style of learning, we decided to take it all on--content, form, pedagogy, methodology, assessment,  you name it.   We've begun to think of this as "Prototyping Learning."   Rather than "knowledge" being static, once it is "networked" it necessarily becomes fluid.   That's what this MA is about:  how to relearn how to learn for a fast-changing world, how to use social networking and other digital tools to maximize our creativity and productivity, how to constantly understand the deep structure of social change (i.e. the way humanists are trained to do) in order to think in the most pragmatic and practical ways about a changing workplace (i.e. not a typical component of humanist training).

Thus the "prototype."   Since we are all about to move into a former tobacco warehouse repurposed into the Franklin Humanities Institute Labs, what better way to reinvision learning than as a mashup that is constantly new, constantly a prototype of what comes next, and never, ever a finished project.   That's close to the customizing, user-generated, mashup, remix world we live in--and virtually nothing about our current institutions of education or work have been redesigned for this new world.

So that's the prototype learning.  If you want some examples, you can take a look at my previous blog about the new MA in Knowledge and Networks here:  http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/knowledge-and-networks-model-... And if you want a good example of the method of this prototype learning, take a look at the first assignment in the transdisciplinary collaborative, project-based tutorial "class"--made up half of graduate students and half undergraduates in eight different fields--that I'll be running this coming fall semester:  http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/open-letter-students-future-t...

Early in September, we'll be putting the draft prospectus for the new MA in Knowledge and Networks up on a public tool--probably on Comment Press, and we'll be running a Forum where we solicit feedback, url's for other similar programs we might partner with, and in other ways ask for your input into our prototype as it evolves over the course of the year as it works its way through the various committees on its way to what we hope will be final approval by our Board of Trustees.

But what about this "Prototrip"?   We're thinking there has to be a way that we can expand our experiment in a new form of practical-because-deep education beyond Duke, even beyond HASTAC.  Depth is practical in a radically changing, global world where "traditional" forms (how we read, write, publish, communicate, interact, create our communities, online and offline) are all changing moment by moment.  Culture and context matter in a work world changing this fast.  And that's where humanistic knowledge comes in handy----if only we can stir humanists to understand what they have to contribute and why they need to be rethinking themselves in order to contribute to the workplace of the future. 

 So we are playing with ways that we can take our prototype on the road.  Roadtrip.  Prototripping.   Get it?  We're not sure how a voluntary, free, no-dues organization can do this but we'll be working on this idea for the next month or two, reaching out to some partners, and, we hope, beginning to Prototrip a new kind of learning for a new world of work.   Stay tuned!  We hope to be coming to a community--virtual or actual--near you.