Michael Wesch

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Building cultures of creativity in the age of the Knowledge Machine <strong>Michael</strong> <strong>Wesch</strong> 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 Cultures of Creativities 73
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 Cultures of Creativities 74
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