Michael Wesch

MICHAEL WESCH
Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Coffman
Chair for Distinguished Teaching Scholars at Kansas State
University, KS, USA
BUILDING CULTURES OF CREATIVITY IN THE
AGE OF THE KNOWLEDGE MACHINE

Building cultures of creativity in the age
of the Knowledge Machine
Michael Wesch
Twenty years ago, Seymour Papert visited a preschool where he
was drawn into a discussion led by inquisitive four-year-olds on
the matter of how giraffes sleep. He was impressed by what he
called “a bumper crop of good theories” but no theory could
come to grips with the matter of where the giraffe would put
its head (Papert, 1993). Though Papert himself had grown up
in Africa, he had to admit that he did not know how a giraffe
slept, and so it remained a mystery.
sleep” of giraffa camelopardalis which explain that a giraffe
often sleeps by resting its head on its “croup” - and if you
don’t know what a croup is you can perform an image search
which will reveal a picture of the position: the giraffe’s long
neck twisting around to its hind-quarters including the clever
caption, “Oh Butt, I love you.”
That evening, Papert did what people often did twenty years
ago when confronted by such a mystery. He consulted his personal
library of books. He never did find out how giraffes sleep.
Even his great library was not up to the task. However, Papert
also knew that such barriers were about to fall. He imagined a
machine that would allow even small children to use “speech,
touch, or gestures” to quickly navigate “through a knowledge
space much broader than the contents of any printed encyclopedia.”
He called it “the Knowledge Machine” (Papert, 1993).
And here we are. Billions of people are connecting and collaborating
on a global network and the artifacts of this collaboration
- which include enough knowledge and know-how to
dwarf even the greatest libraries throughout all of history - is
now accessible with any one of the various devices that we
carry around with us. This “Knowledge Machine” will give you
56,000 videos of giraffes ranging from jerky cell phone footage
to costly Animal Planet productions, and over 15,000 websites
that directly answer the question of how giraffes sleep. Google
Scholar offers several scientific articles on the “paradoxical
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However, Papert was not interested in simple information
retrieval, nor would he have been especially impressed by
online educational efforts like Massive Open Online Courses
(MOOCs) and the Khan Academy which promise to radically
change education. Such efforts may be more efficient and
sometimes better forms of “instruction”, but Papert was not as
interested in “instruction” as he was in helping students learn.
In contrast to “instructionism” Papert proposed “constructionism”
as an alternative mode of educational innovation,
noting that knowledge is constructed by the learner, rather
than transmitted by the teacher, and that one of the best ways
to inspire and facilitate knowledge construction is to engage
learners in constructing a meaningful product (Papert & Harel,
1991).
By harnessing and leveraging the “Knowledge Machine” to
engage students in real problems and projects, Papert hoped
to fulfill the vision of John Dewey 100 years before him
(Papert, 1998). That way the otherwise authoritarian school
environments that dictated to students what they should learn,
and how they should learn it, while often doing great harm to
their sense of autonomy and self-efficacy might be usurped.
A strong sense of autonomy and self-efficacy is essential to creativity
across all cultures, and finding creative domains within
any given culture is often an exercise in finding spaces where
authority is not pervasive, prescriptive, or unwelcoming of
alternative perspectives. Indeed, some cultures have been
misunderstood as placing less value on creativity simply because
the domain where we might expect creativity (namely “art”
which in the Western conception includes paintings, sculpture,
and music) is heavily regulated and ritualized due to the power
inherent in the created objects.
For example, when I was doing my anthropological fieldwork
among the Nekalimin in New Guinea I became interested in
decorating my house with a traditional-style Nekaliin houseboard.
Among the Nekalimin, houseboards are large planks of
wood standing about 6 to 8 feet high decorated with geometric
patterns of diamonds and triangles in red, black, and white. To
my surprise, nobody could make one for me. They do not look
especially difficult to make. There is little precision to their
construction, the geometric designs are imprecise and fairly
haphazard, lines are not straight, and paints are often mixed
and smudged with little care. I was certain that it would be an
easy thing to make, so I asked my friend Peni why nobody could
make one for me. Peni explained that while the skill to make a
houseboard was not especially great, the knowledge required
to design one was reserved only for those who had been properly
initiated. Houseboards are not just symbols of power,
they are power, and painting one required that a particular set
of ritual procedures and taboos be followed.
Such rituals and taboos have led many people to report that
cultures such as the Nekalimin lack a culture of innovation and
creativity, but this is not true. On another occasion I climbed
the mountain to Peni’s house to find him skillfully cutting
a trough through the middle of a branch of wood about two
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meters long. He then took two nails and hammered them in
to the ends of the trough and went into his house to retrieve
something. He came out with some old and beaten batteries
that he had warmed in the fire and carefully lined them up in
the trough between the two nails. He tied two wires to the nails
and connected them to an old radio. He playfully laughed at his
accomplishment as the radio came to life and started to sing.
Over the next several years I would watch Peni fix many radios.
He had no formal training. He simply studied the objects and
through trial and error built up a repertoire of techniques.
Throughout our schooling, which is largely based on “instruction
ism,” we have been taught that knowledge comes from the
expert. Peni’s knowledge of the radio developed because there
was no expert. Unschooled, he was not limited to the solutions
that might be taught by the expert, and so his axe was as likely
to be used for a tool as a soldering iron. He mixed and melded
the knowledge from many domains of his life to become a
master radio technician unlike any in the Western world.
This is not to say that he would not benefit from learning from
otherswith expert knowledge of this domain. The example
portraysa peculiar and very subtle double-aspect of expertise.
On the one hand, we have all experienced the power of learning
from a skilled master who can guide us beyond our current
capacities. But if, on the other hand, this guidance becomes
authoritarian prescription, such expertise will come at the cost
of autonomy and self-efficacy.
become reliant on procedures, and when they do not know a
procedure for solving the problem at hand they tend to shut
down and wait for the authority to guide them.
When Papert and Sherry Turkle examined computer classes in
the late 1980s and early 1990s they found several examples of
otherwise bright and creative students shutting down as their
teachers forced them away from their own styles of programming
towards prescriptive procedures. The students became
alienated from their work. One student noted that she had to
become “another kind of person,” and called this her “not-me
strategy” (Papert & Turkle, 1992).
Cultures of creativity thrive wherever there is respect and
space for multiple styles to flourish and play together, where
novices can construct their own expertise by building from their
own experiences and knowledge-base, and where “experts”
remain open to learning.
When we fully accept that knowledge is constructed by the
learner and not simply passed from one person to another,
we must also fully accept that the integrity, motivation, and
self-efficacy of the learner are of utmost concern. The stakes
are high. The “Knowledge Machine” does not run on its own.
Without self-motivation, curiosity, and a strong sense of
autonomy and self-efficacy the “Knowledge Machine” becomes
nothing but a grand and powerful distraction device.
The subtlety of this distinction can be illustrated with the
following example. Children learning double-column addition
(such as 57+25) will be told to add the “ones” column first
(7+5=12), carry the 1 to the tens column, and then add the
tens. Constance Kamii has shown that children universally
prefer to add the tens first, and can very easily accomplish
these calculations in their head in this manner (50 + 20 = 70
+ 12 = 82) (Kamii & Joseph, 1988). Forcing children to add
the ones column first teaches them a “procedure” that they
can then apply to very large addition problems later on, but it
does so at the expense of them losing their direct sense of the
numbers. They start to approach math as a set of procedures
that must be applied, so that when they later encounter a larger
problem such as 57,123 + 25,019, they are unlikely or even
unable to quickly assess that the solution will be about 82,000,
or to realize that in fact the entire problem is relatively simple
when broken down sensibly rather than procedurally (adding
19 to 123 + 82,000 = 82,142). The larger effect is that they
REFERENCES
Kamii, C. & Joseph, L. (1988), ‘Teaching Place Value and Double-Column Addition’,
Arithmetic Teacher, vol. 35, no. 6, pp. 48-52.
Papert, S. (1993), The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the
Computer, New York, NY: Basic Books.
Papert, S. (1998), Child Power: Keys to the New Learning of the Digital Century,
Colin Cherry Memorial Lecture at the Imperial College, London. June 2, 1998,
accessed: May 2013, available from: http://www.papert.org/articles/Childpower.
html.
Papert, S. & Harel, I. (1991), Constructionism, New York, NY: Ablex Publishing
Corporation.
Papert, S. & Turkle, S. (1992), ‘Epistemological Pluralism and the Revaluation of the
Concrete’, Journal of Mathematical Behavior, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 3-33.
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