Categories
children climate change local government

Messaging for change

Matt Lawrey currently serves the community as a second term Nelson City Councillor. He is also the creator of New Zealand’s popular cartoon on family life, The Little Things. We talk about he brings from his background in the media, and how he is working to achieve a thriving green society for his family.

How do we design our city for thriving?

Encouraging people to look to the positive.

Our biggest problem is a lack of imagination

How do we fire people’s imaginations?

Questions that make people feel uncomfortable.

Getting more people thinking that engagement is the normal thing to do.

Nature gives us everything we need for free, we just need to respect that.

Giving people something to embrace.

My success is about using my voice to amplify those of others.

Definition: What works for me is how do we continue to live without killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Superpower: Resilience (hammer, reject, reject, push, push, push – eventually good ideas come to surface). And speaking out, even when I know it would cost me.

Activist” Wary of the term. Certainly activist energy to give to local government. An important part of change is to take a lot of people with you. Just winning the point doesn’t make change happen.

The voices of the future are only going to get louder

This conversation was recorded in Nelson in April 2019.

Categories
children education

Every student can make a difference

Graham Henton is an inspirational Enviro Science Teacher at Whakatane Intermediate School, in the Eastern Bay of Plenty. We talk about his background, his approach to teaching and the restoration of the Awatapu lagoon and why he loves what he is doing.

Talking points

What a difference a child can make

Every child – I believe in you

Understanding – what we do as human beings

Interdependence is everything

If you don’t like Enviro, come and talk to Mr H, what’s going worng, what am I doing wrong?

Too many takers and not enough givers

I’ve made up a word for people who are selfish: BigISpoilers – their mission in life is to spoil things for everything and everyone else. I encourage the kids to be enviro-kids, and they are going to assist the planet to be sustainable.


Empower their life of making a difference

Put your cards on the table, lets figure out what we can do

Why would you want to cultivate a culture of extravagance?

They’re doing it, that my legacy.

It buzzes me out, I met people all over NZ, big burly fellas at the petrol station, “Mr H you believed in me”. I empower kids to make a difference. I want to empower children to make a difference in their life first, and then make a difference in the environment. They’re doing, that is my greatest encouragement.

Sustainability: Helping earth, not fighting it. Allowing the earth to do what it wants to do without us ruining and spoiling. Instead of creating carnage wherever we go.

Success: meeting students years later. In high school, trying to continue what we have begun here. Young children, 10-11 years old, they’re getting it, they’re embarking on a life of sustainability.

Superpower: Empowering young people, to help them understand the importance of the environment. People don’t do things unless they understand it, my job as an educator is to help them understand why we do stuff.

Kids teaching me – I love it. Boom!

Because I love what I’m doing, and because I’m enthusiastic about it, the kids love it (mostly).

Activist? I don’t think so, I’m just a passionate person who believes that passion breeds passion. Enthusiasm breeds enthusiasm. I’ve taken the time to develop a programme that works with kids, and I believe in it.

The world is filled with people who believe in things, and people who believe in things, make things happen. I what kids to know that, to believe that, that they can make things happen.

Categories
children computing design

Children as design partners in technology and sustainability

Allison Druin

We’ve got to start with the large to be able to connect the dots of excellence.


Professor Allison Druin is a Professor in the iSchool and Chief Futurist for the Division of Research at University of Maryland. She has been a leader in the the use of children as design partners, which has been widely applied, including to digital libraries for children (eg ICDL). She is currently seconded to the National Park Service, where she is Special Advisor for National Digital Strategy.

Talking points

With an inventor scientist father and an artist mother I’m a mix between the two of them

My undergraduate degree is in graphic design…A wonderful thing, I always say to people, if you want a real degree: problem solving, creativity, exploration – go get yourself a degree in design, it’s incredible.

I realised that I think like a designer -sometimes visually, sometimes problem solving – but really it’s about what are the parameters in front of me, how can I think out of the box to make something better than it is today.

Then at MIT, in my head I was translating from design-speak to technology-speak.

Not just how technology affects children but how children affect the design of technology

I was a big proponent – back when this was a bit of the lunatic fringe – of really hearing the voices of users as designers, as participants, full participants in the design process.

Rarely do you get a chance to ask kids who don’t have a lot of experience with technology, how do you tell stories? Why do you tell stories? What matters to you with stories? and then to work with them to figure out what that means in terms of new technologies.

It’s a people-led process – its understanding the needs of people, the desires of people, it’s also understanding how processes work, and how they are broken. And where you can bring solutions in that make change

We’re an information-centric world – the scale and speed that information moves, and we need better solutions, we can’t just keep doing the same things faster.

When we do amazing research for a particular population, it spreads like wildfire to what the rest of the world needs

The sooner you can get kids into the design process, the better the outcome will be, and the shorter the process will be in terms of back-end testing.

The notion of cultural tolerance was always underneath the surface of everything we do.

It was never about how do we make kids better readers, it was always how do we help people think about each other, oh and by the way, make them a better reader at the same time.

National Parks Service…a long time partner…maybe it is time for me to come in and think about a national strategy

How do we make it so that kids have a lifelong experience with parks? The pre- and post- experiences can be enhanced with new technologies

Today’s kids will look harder at the mountains if they’ve got a cellphone in their hands.

They’re thinking deeply about what is it that I am doing so that then I can report back to my friends.

Kids have a hard time not being able to be reporters themselves, not being able to share that experience.

If we do let our technology separate us from our physical world too much, that is a bad thing, but with embedded, mobile, ubiquitous technologies we can have physical/digital switching seriously, without a context collapse.

So what sort of language do we use with the Park Service about digital?

What does it mean to have 24/7 to the front door of the parks? Traditionally we built larger and larger visitor centres with beautiful exhibits, but what happens if the mobile app is the front door?

What would it mean if kids could digitally tag a landscape – to tell other kids this is a really cool place to go?

The messages, themes, are really important – the parks are about stewardship, about learning. The parks are not necessarily glorified vacation spots.

The parks are our best idea in education – they’re about teaching the American public that we need to be stewards of our own environment, or else there’s not going to be an environment.

Traditionally we’ve not been able to implicitly share these themes – some administrations haven’t wanted us to focus on climate change or the science behind things. Thankfully in more recent times we have been able to say the science matters, climate change matters, how do we look to ensure we are preserving

This goes for digital too – how do we look to digital to preserve what we know and what we care about?

The first innovation of the Park Service was the campfire (talks), before that they were really just to protect the land from poachers. In the campfire discussions we started talking about the stories behind the wilderness, the culture and the heritage that we have.

(Success) People taking up the methods: children in the design process.

People don’t question why we need to have children at the design table anymore, they just question why we haven’t done it sooner.

(Activist) I think all good academics, researchers, thinkers, are activists. Because we have to share ideas, we have to share what we are thinking. And we have to convince people that what we are doing matters, is unique and truly is a contribution.

(Motivation) Being able to help make change in this world.

CHI Conference (of which Allison is 2016 co-chair) theme is CHI for Good.

Making a little bit of change is going to make the world a little bit better in the long run. It’s not about making money, it’s not about better law, it’s about making people’s lives better.

We’re in a field HCI Human Computer Interaction, that starts with humans,

I’ve never seen such a uniformly positive response to a conference theme in 30 years of coming to this conference.

(how will it stick, not just be the year CHI was good) People really care deeply about change, and keeping that activist-change idea in the CHI community.

We’ve found that the impactful research is where you create innovative technologies that have broad impact.

(Challenges) HCI at scale.

It’s not about one type of user, one type of interaction. How do we work for multitudes of users, in multitudes of contexts, with multitudes of data.

(Miracle) I use this question. My most favourite answer was from a kid who I asked if you could wave a magic wand in your library, what would it be? And he didn’t know what a magic wand was – he had learnt to read reading his Mom’s magazines in the beauty shop. Once I had explained – if you could just change something, what would it be? He said, “I’d put grass on the floor of the library”. I said “what?” and he said “I’ve always been afraid to sit in the grass and read a book where I live, and that’s what I’ve always wanted to do”. So if I could wave a magic wand, I’d give grass everywhere so kids could feel safe, to learn, to be quiet, to explore, to do whatever they wanted, to sit and read a book.

That’s the challenge – HCI, technology at scale. When I got to the Park Service one of my colleagues said maybe you should start with one small thing and grow it. But I said that’s the problem, we’ve been doing that for too many years, we’ve got to see the larger picture. We’ve got to start with the large to be able to connect the dots of excellence.

We do so many wonderful things in this world, but they don’t seem to be connected to the next wonderful thing. In those connections, that glue, that’s where change can happen.

Working with children as design partners – it’s the surprises that make it worth doing everyday.
Could I have imagined that a kid would ask for grass on the floor the public library?
What does that mean? Can technology help? I made a digital library that makes it as fun to do the reading as the searching.

(Advice) Be a futurist. If all of us collectively could not just try and predict the future, but really try and prepare for it. And in preparing for the future we do what matters today – and the rest is commentary.

My children insist I put up this one too:

Allison Druin 2

 

This conversation was recorded at CHI2016.

Categories
children social work

Caring for children


Dr Nicola Atwool knows children. She cares for children too. Not just one or two or a few like most of us. Dr Atwool cares for all of them. And she knows most about caring for them than surely anyone does. She has combined a career as a front-line social worker with an academic career and mixed in a fair splash of government policy advice.

In a society that is becoming used to statistics about increasing inequality, and where 1 in 4 children are living in poverty, Dr Atwool takes us on a journey of what this means from a child’s perspective. The tale is one of hardship – what families are not able to provide. And these things are not just nice to haves – they affect health, mental health and schooling. Education is the most at risk, with children in poverty missing out on this social capital leading to what Dr Atwool calls intergenerational transfer of poverty and inequity.

She tells us why she thinks the government refuses to engage in an holistic model that takes child poverty seriously, believes that work is the only solution, and subsequently fails children. Part of this is the short term thinking favoured by the electoral cycle.    It doesn’t help that an increasingly polarised society with people opposed to a “nanny state”, and that the family is private, yet are happy that a surveillance model being applied to our most impoverished.  At the root, she says, is an increasing tolerance for inequality.

Dr Atwool also talks about the positives, even in the face of adversity. She describes factors that encourage resilience – achieving positive outcomes in the face of adversity. Important here are the characteristics of the child – high self esteem; the presence of a supportive family environment; a supportive person in their environment; and positive cultural connections.

To make a real difference, Dr Atwool would like to see a cross-party accord focussed on increasing the social capital of children.

Shane’s number of the week: 50.7. That’s the percent that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has lost coral cover in the past 27 years (more>>>)

Sam’s joined-up-thinking: Sam wonders if a new set of criteria for judging the quality of essays could be borrowed for improving sustainable software (more>>>).

Categories
children geography

Children’s place


Associate Professor Claire Freeman heads the planning programmes at the University of Otago. Claire’s focus is on the relationship between people and their environments – from urban biodiversity, to human dimensions in conservation. In this interview Claire tells us how environments enhance or detract from children’s lives. Over a generation the free play range has shrunk from around seven miles to the street and even front garden. No longer do kids describe a social activity “we went…”, instead play is a solitary or organised activity: “I went…”. Claire says the impacts of this are detrimental to society. This can be seen in delayed development, an inability to manage own time, changes in mental maps, social skills and a loss of a sense of place.

The sense of place for children is a theme of Claire’s work and can be seen in the experiences of children in Christchurch. She talks of ongoing dislocations, and complexities with multiple moves and fragmented families. Despite this, there is a strong sense of place – 81% said they still wanted to live in Christchurch. The hearing of children’s voices is important in planning. In other work she describes studies in Dunedin and Fiji aimed at garnering insight into what makes places work for children. By working with children to explore aerial maps of their suburb, Claire derives measures of social connections in space. The most socially connected children attend a local school, belong to an identifiable community and have lots of independence.

Shane’s number of the week: 4131. That’s a record 4131 megawatts of power produced by wind turbines in the UK last week.

Sam’s joined-up-thinking: Local currencies. Local trade but not necessarily sustainable.