Story/Story, Building/Building, Street/Street

Jun 1, 2018
11 min read

I love living and working in the city. I think it goes all the way back to growing up in the very small town of New Kingstown. From my earliest times of being outside the house, I was exposed to the relationship expressed in the title of this blog, which is an abbreviated version of one of my favorite INXS songs, The Stairs.

This month's blog is best summarized by connectivity, between individuals and groups. On of my personality traits is as an extrovert, I am energized when I see people working in collaboration. It is where I thrive. I hope you will find that thriving happening in the updates of the STEAM projects at the John Harris and SciTech Campuses.

STEAM Making @ John Harris Campus High School

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, MATHEMATICS:

STEM Lab (Mr. Gigac)

Mr. Gigac has been working hard to encourage students to finish up the trifold presentations of their projects. There are a total of 7, 3D printing, 3D CNC, Bridge Simulator, Zometool, (2) Snapcircuits, and LEGO EV3 Robotics. The students used Microsoft Publisher to create separate slides of required information. This was a title, group of student names, 3-4 blocks of text, 4-5 photographs, and any necessary titles under the photos. One they were printed, the groups worked to cut the paper down and glue them to colored construction paper.

Students were encouraged to be as creative as possible. Even one of the groups decided to glue 3D objects to their presentation. The one student who has made the most progress has really gotten into the Snapcircuits. At the beginning of the year, they were not really interested in anything in the STEM Lab. After about 6 months, they were trying different projects in Snapcircuits and could explain the function of some of the parts. This is capacity building within the classroom. Mr. Gigac has seen a shift in how students are more prone to start in on their projects, self motivating. It will be exciting to see some of the displays at the May 5th MakerShift event.

DIGITAL ARTS & MEDIA:

STEM Lab (Mr. Cooper)

Mr. Cooper has been busy pulling together all the content that the students have created over the school year. We talked about how to teach the students to go back and be more rigorous in labeling the individual productions. Sometimes they were pretty good about the recordings, but other times, a couple of the days were overlapped into the wrong day.

One other good thing is that Mr. Cooper has a couple of strong Sophmores who will be able to instruct a new group of students next year. We are hoping that both CCA and Marshall provides some strong candidates to build off of this first year. This is capacity building at its best. This is also seen when the students take ownership of the broadcast, encouraging each other not to be late, or helping them through a couple of takes because of bloopers. The students are also using some of the effects in the Tricaster to give the production their own feel. It is exciting to see what will be happening next year when the quality is deepened into telling students stories.

STEAM Making @ SciTech Campus High School

SCIENCE:

Trout in the Classroom (Ms. Roberts)

Our TIC Release Day was finally

scheduled for Friday, May 4th. It worked out as a dual purpose trip to visit the Messiah College School of Engineering and Health’s Symposium that day. We’ll have a group of 20 students going over to the college. The very first thing that they will be doing is a release of the fish and take some water and temperature samples. Then the teacher is planning to have lunch and then visit the symposium.

DIGITAL ARTS & MEDIA:

STEM Lab (Mr. Elo)

George Elo and his students were able to produce a clean broadcast on Thursday, April 18th. They worked hard to plan out their A/B schedule and realize the amount of work it takes to complete two broadcasts during one class period. There is much more to be planned out such as creating a new intro reel, end credits and how to distribute the files to the teachers. George had always wanted to show the announcements during lunch in the lower level cafeteria. The problem is that nobody knows how the wires are connected to the LCD computer monitors in the basement. This is beyond the scope of this years effort and it has been noted in Planners to work with IT and AV to find a viable solution.

STEAM Making @ Midtown

MakerShift

The big excitement through April was the upcoming MakerShift in Midtown Harrisburg. I have been working with teachers at both schools to line up projects that can be displayed and demonstrated at the event on Saturday, May 5th from 10A-3P.

SciTech Campus:

• Technology - SciBots Robotics Club - Demonstrating the 3305 and 3283 FIRST Tech Challenge competition robots

• Arts - AV Studio Broadcasting - Demonstrating the recording process

John Harris Campus:

• STEM Lab - Display boards of 3D Printing, the Inventables Carver, the Zometool, and Snapciruits.

• AV Studio - Display boards of the Cougar TV AV Crew

In a room above a busy street The echoes of a life The fragments and the accidents Separated by incidents

Listen to by the walls We share the same spaces Repeated in the corridors Performing the same movements

Story to story Building to building Street to street We pass each other on the stairs

Listen to by the walls We share the same spaces Repeated in the corridors Performing the same movements

The nature of your tragedy Is chained around your neck Do you lead or are you lead Are you sure that you don't care

There are reasons here to give your life And follow in your way The passion lives to keep your faith Though all are different, all are great

Climbing as we fall We dare…

INXS, The Stairs, 1990

For some reason, the month of April felt like a month of Community Making. The song The Stairs, by the band INXS, comes to mind when I discuss community. This is one of my favorite topics, due to my background in architecture and urban design. My life of making with the schools always mixes in with community making - what surfaces is capacity building in both areas. This month there have been a couple of books circulating around in my head on this topic.

On Friday April 20th, my family and I drove out to Clearfield, PA to attend a funeral of a family friend. I had loaded up my iPad with several Podcasts. One of my favorites is the Cracked.com Podcast. There was a thought provoking 4/16/2018 episode on Pop Culture and heroes titled Creepy Propaganda Hidden In Your Favorite Modern Pop Culture. I must provide warning that some of the language and content is NSFW, so proceed with caution. This episode was fairly clean and actually dug into some disturbing areas of what becomes Pop Culture is has some larger implications on how we operate in the world.

Alex Schmidt and Jason Pargin were talking about what our current pop culture will look like 20-30 years from now. The wondered how the some of the current and not so current (1980s & 1990s) movies and TV would be viewed in the future. The obvious was the inherent issues of good guy bad guy conflicts. Movies like Batman, Robocop, Deathwish, Mission Impossible as well as TV shows such as 24 and The Lone Ranger were discussed in light of good and bad. Admittedly each of those examples had their own issues in race and class. Ideas such as the cultural perceptions of drugs and the “taking back the neighborhood” were highlighted and seen as 20/20 hindsight.

Connected to this was the idea of a single individual (typically a guy) taking charge and “fixing things.” This goes against what we know statistically as a necessary community approach to solving problems - communication and collaboration. The hosts did recognize that many of the movie, tv and video game stories did operate under a “we’ve tried everything else” narrative before a strong plan of action was adopted. There was also some discussion to acknowledge that we are looking back on history with a clearer lens of awareness.

This got me wondering if this is something that is inherently human. Do we always cheer for a single person to save us? The search for a "messiah" is something that might be very real as represented in our culture. Even to the extreme that our "messiah" as depicted in stories (visual and written) might even push the limits to enact harmful policies on the majority. The podcast really pushed into some tough issues.

ethos: n

the character spirit

of a culture, era, or community

as manifested in

its beliefs and aspirations

I also began to think of a related issue of individuals wanting to be fixers. I have to admit that I know that this is one of my traits. If I see something that is not operating correctly, I try to help make corrections. Now this is not with everything. There are obvious limitations. My brother would call this the "6 foot space." We can only deal with items in our immediate space. My brother had this perspective to help manage modern life. I think this is a great rule of thumb, with the caveat to have awareness of the bigger perspective. I can fix "the 6 feet around me", which in my mind is the hyperlocal.

The topic of hyperlocal (originated from 19991) surfaced recently in the Healing American Democracy (HAD) book am reading. The idea is that our American system is going through shift in ethos. While I was out of the Harrisburg Area my mind wanted in this book and another called On Being Awesome. Amazingly the words each each book crossed paths and ignited some answers that I had been searching for in the overlap of capacity building at the classroom level, school level, District level, and community level. Beyond the level of city, I have no influence. I do not fully believe the one might be able to affect change in this current environment. There is too much fragmentation and that is why the HAD book is important. They developed the term Constitutional Localism to describe what is needed in order to really knit together or rebuild some of America's larger social and economic issues. In the HAD book, this is seen in the quote on page 4 and I provided a summary of the 3 Civic Ethoses.

“Whenever the country’s future has been in jeopardy

and division has threatened the national fabric,

as it does now, a new civic ethos has emerged.

Over the course of U.S. history

there have been three previous times

of such intense political crisis or

“crucible moments,”[3] each followed by the

creation of a new civic ethos,

or governing framework.”

1st Civic Ethos = U.S. Constitution - 13 Colonies transforming into a United States of America

2nd Civic Ethos = Civil War, 13th, 14th, & 15th Amendments - Abolition of Slavery and refining State’s Rights.

3rd Civic Ethos = Great Depression survival and New Deal Politics

In the book On Being Awesome the author, Nick Riggle, looks at the intersection of individuality and community. For him awesome is acting out in the public realm as people who "excel at creating and sustaining social openings." (Riggle, p.45) These are the places where we can be human with other human beings. To Riggle, "awesome people" are "creative community buildings, whose inspired social insight and communal spirit promote coperson creation. (Riggle, p.45) He outlines these ideas through Chapter 3, The Ethics of Awesomeness. This must be done in a non-self promoting way. If anything becomes self promoting, then the opposite of awesome appears - suckiness. This issue here is that this works best at the local level of face to face. So what stopped me in my tracks during reading this book was the in reading Riggle's quote in Chapter 5, The Origins of Awesome. It is worth repeating because of the importance of the overlap.

"If this hypothesis is on the right track, then we should be able to find forms of culture that emerged or flourished after the 1960s and that, in one way or another, embody the ethics of awesomeness.

We should be able to locate not only individual awesome actions - which of course we have done - but large cultural forms and movements that embody or reflect this new ETHOS [emphasis added]."

At the National Level there is change happening, but it is too fragmented. It also shifts to a level where systems are too large. In the community work, I always fall back to two number groups. The first is from my undergraduate thesis, where Robin Dunbar, a psychology professor was looking at a socializing within chimpanzee. This 3/9/1999 NYT Article A Couple of Chimps Sitting Around Talking, captures the purpose of the research. After all these years, the reading of that article is still on my mind. It is now called Dunbar's Number, which is looking at 150 stable relationships. For a discussion about Social Networks, check out this 1/25/2018 CNET Article Sorry, Facebook friends: Our brains can't keep up.

The other number group was 100s & 50s. In the Bible, the Book of Mark 6:40, Jesus directs the disciples to divide the crowd of 5000 into small groups of 100s and 50s. This was the way to address the needs of providing food to a large number of people as they were fed by 5 loaves and two fish. This also seemed to be a way to successfully manage people. Have you been somewhere lately and seen 100-150 people? If you have been to your local movie theater, it would hold about 200-300 people, which gives you an idea of what is manageable. On a side note...here is a great resource on theater design from Theatre Solutions. Professor Dr. G. Keith Still has some great info on crowd sizes on his website Crowd Safety and Risk Analysis.

Image from Action for Innovation blog by Stephen Clulow showing showing Core to Casual Relationships.

Why does this matter? In community building, the local is extremely important. Communication and collaboration is a bit easier. No powered sound amplification is necessary. The individual (part) and the community (whole) are in a dynamic relationship. This is not perfect as it takes an effort to balance the part and whole.

This gets back to the idea of leading. Who in these groups became the leader? How did they lead? The Bible doesn’t say. It doesn’t say that everything went haywire. The assumption was that these community groups of 100 or 50 took care of each other. I haven’t fully thought through this yet, but as I continue to read through these books the next month, I hope to see the these connection between the individual and the community as it relates to Chaordic (merging of chaos & order). I know this keeps surfacing. I started thinking about these in my 12/2017 blog post Between the 1,000 and the 1. Interesting enough on the topic of connectivity, a new study from University of Kansas Associate Professor of Communication Study, Jeffrey Hall, has arrived at 100 hours of connectivity to arrive to the point of friendship with another human. You can look at the online tool that they developed called the Interactive Friendship Tool. The tool look at predicting what I would consider your level of "connectivity" with another person from Acquaintance, Casual Fiend, Friend, and Close Friend.This is fascinating in light or all of our interactions. From our close friends to those we might pass by on the street. It takes time to build relationships. We certainly know this at the Foundry Makerspace. This is essential in capacity building. It takes time. Many times this is messy.

Why do I think all of this relates to MAKING? I think it is important to encourage a nonhierarchical structure so that people could feel empowered to step into fulfilling their purpose through their KSAs (knowledge, skills and abilities.). A diagram to best summarize this was provided by the business and software world, "Metcalfe's Law Opportunity Gap." Metcalfe's Law looks at the connectivity in a telecommunications network, where the there the network is proportional to the # of connected users.

In this journey of life, this is a constant balance of individual and community. It is always good to be reminded of that at all of our scales from our door, our sidewalk, our block, our neighborhood, our district, our town, our city, our region, our state.

"Story to story Building to building Street to street We pass each other on the stairs"

epilogue:

In the writing of this blog post, I stumbled upon this CAIRN.INFO article in the Journal of Innovation Economics, Rethinking Boundaries for Innovation, by Joachim Hafkesbirnk & Markus Schroll. The title is Innovation 3.0: Embedding into Community Knowledge - Collaborative Organizational Learning Beyond Open Innovation. This is pretty typical at the Foundry as we are always in dialog of our process. We are a Learning Community, and this paper has some interesting diagrams that I need to dig into over the month of May.