1. Expand the Atlas team
  2. How do we design and develop Atlas?

How don't we want to design Atlas?

How do we want to design Atlas?

Principles

  1. Focus
  2. Make it explicit
  3. Balance thinking and doing
  4. Think in jobs to be done
  5. …?
What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. […] the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.

What are we trying to do?

  1. Reunite learning and living
  2. "students" ➡️ "independent investigators"
  3. ➡️ People work on things they care about
  4. ➡️ People work on different things at different times, and we don't know what they are ahead of time
  5. 🛑 But, we have to award credit.

What is 💸?

Where does it get its value?

"Money's a matter of functions four,
A Medium, a Measure, a Standard, a Store."

What is credit? Where does it come from?

  1. A claim you did something…
  2. Certified by a "trusted" "authority"…
  3. Where trust is about the truth of the claim…
  4. And authority is about the value implied by the claim.

What problems are we trying to solve?

Disintermediation

A future without school probably still involves "credit" of some sort.

We want to disintermediate ourselves in performing both of these functions. This is already trending as "competency based" and "mastery based" education.

But there's a more fundamental problem…

Certain forms of knowledge and control require a narrowing of vision. The great advantage of such tunnel vision is that it brings into sharp focus certain limited aspects of an otherwise far more complex and unwieldy reality. This very simplification, in turn, makes the phenomenon at the center of the field of vision more legible and hence more susceptible to careful measurement and calculation. Combined with similar observations, an overall, aggregate, synoptic view of a selective reality is achieved, making possible a high degree of schematic knowledge, control, and manipulation.

Legibility

Disempowerment of people

Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags. New educational institutions would break apart this pyramid.

[The teacher as narrator] leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into "containers," into "receptacles" to be "filled" by the teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are.

Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the "banking" concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. […] apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.

Disempowerment of ideas

Jean Piaget’s very strong idea that all learning takes place by discovery is emasculated by its translation into the common practice known in schools as “discovery learning.” It is disempowered in part because discovery stops being discovery when it is orchestrated to happen on the preset agenda of a curriculum but also in large part because the ideas being learned are disempowered. […] Most physics curricula are similar to the math curriculum in that they force the learner into dissociated learning patterns and defer the "interesting" material past the point where most students can remain motivated enough to learn it. The powerful ideas and the intellectual aesthetic of physics is lost in the perpetual learning of "prerequisites."

To solve this, we are going to…

  1. Avoid imposing legibility, i.e. avoid driving by curricula. (FYI, curriculum is Latin for racecourse, like for 🐎).
  2. Ensure trust by capturing primary sources
  3. Offer authority by making learning claims inspectable, capturing connections between primary sources and claims of "coverage".

This is impossibly labor intensive approached naively.

  1. Make storytelling worthwhile enough to justify documentation and reflection.
  2. Make documentation and reflection fluid and ritual enough that people actually have the bandwidth to capture structured evidence of and information about "coverage".
  3. 👆🏼 Atlas tries to do #2

What do we know about Atlas what Atlas needs to do?

What are its nouns and verbs?

Nouns

  1. Structured representations of people's personal and professional goals
  2. Structured representations of what people (both staff and youth) know or can do—e.g. Common Core standards
  3. Media generated by work (including media feeding into its production and metadata about its role and provenance)
  4. Annotations (a) of work (critiques, reflections), and (b) of self (critiques, reflections)
  5. Mappings between {3, 4} ↔ {1, 2}
  6. "Completion" annotations of those mappings

Verbs

  1. Capturing media from the process of work
  2. Archiving that media
  3. Finding media for the purposes of reference, reflection, and exhibition
  4. Mapping that archived media onto structured representations of standards and other personal goals
  5. Generating documentation of that mapping and associated annotations as they pertain to "completion"

What do we know about how people will use Atlas?

  1. It must be easy.
  2. It must be useful.
  3. It must support capture from a wide variety of growing sources.
  4. It must be be permanent.
  5. It will likely need ritual to work.

Doesn't this
already exist?

The closest we've found

Where are we now?

Installing Atlas

Using Atlas

  1. TK steps

Debugging Atlas

Where do we go from here?

Specification

Story map

Sketches

Mockup

Brainstorm

Next steps

  1. Using Atlas for your Program of Study
  2. Documenting and reporting issues with Atlas
  3. Develop a specification reflecting Atlas-as-it-is.
  4. Develop a storymap reflecting Atlas-as-it-is.
  5. Develop sketches reflecting Atlas-as-it-is.
  6. Develop a clickable mockup for Atlas-as-it-is.
  7. Brainstorm features for Atlas's next steps