The third day of Constructing Modern Knowledge started with the incredible Carla Rinaldi. She is the President of Reggio Children – Loris Malaguzzi Centre Foundation in Reggio Emilia, Italy. And she was amazing. As she reminded us that children are at the center of what we do, I got that tightness in my chest that comes with real feeling. The process of learning is research. Children have an innate ability to learn or they would die. So learning is a collaboration between the children and researchers and the teacher as researcher. She also made a clear distinction between children learning IN a group and AS a group. Children need others to learn, share ideas, try things out, but the whole group does not learn as one. Each child learns what THEY learn.

The afternoon was capped by a performance by Afro-Cuban Jazz masters Bryan Lynch and Zaccai Curtis. The music was great, but what I appreciated was that Lynch equated the work here at CMK as a community of practice not unlike the jazz community. We all bring our expertise and ability, and we all collaborate on works that are maybe a little familiar to us but new this iteration. Lynch and Curtis demonstrated this in a number of songs where they had different sets of competencies. It was a marvelous way to end.

Our project is “complete” as far as we are going to take it. We have a Virtual Reality Choose Your Own Adventure game with three threads that each have two branches. It’s easy, just enormously time consuming. There will be/may be a web interface some day that makes it easy to create links and move forward to those links, but we haven’t found it yet. We had enough time (as we waited for images to process on the website) to start playing with Microworlds and Turtle Art. A day of good, hard fun.

My favorite poster in the Armory reads: Don’t worry. Be crappy. (Start simple and iterate). 

Good advice.