Kids, Teachers and Parents Learning Wagn
Ethan has started to organize a Wagn Documentation Project, and after our first call I was in the living room where my daughter has PBS kids on, and the credits for one of the programs is runing listing some of their grant sources and such. That's when it hit me that there is a powerful potential for Wagn with all of the constituents in this space of educational media production and use at home and in educational settings.
I had also recently retired my former Mac workstation, an older Mac Mini (I now have a newer iMac that Debbie gave up), and set that machine up as a media machine with output to the television and a wireless keyboard and mouse. My youngest (10 and 1/2) is just starting out with the computer and she goes to PBSKids on the web all weekend when the kids programming isn't on the air.
This is just part of the educational context in our family, but it is a great place to start. Some of the online kids programming is great, though it may be limited to their branded programming, and clearly there is much more potential in the dimensions of interaction and usability, but we can do much much better in the collaborative development of shared educational media assets. There are many dimensions to this, and there will be other blog posts to address things like gift economics and associated finantial institutions and the ongoing stewardship of the collective assets and associated institutions as the emerge, grow and mature. Here I am making a call for participation in a vision, it is a long term vision which necessarily includes these institutional concerns and it is a small scale convergence in working groups on practical projects. In this small scale convergence we have Wagn as an existing community with an emerging gift ecosystem of its own, and the work in that context of creating documentation, and we have this interest that many of us have in having quality educational media available to our kids and a vision for the potential or commons based peer production* in this space.
I want to engage people in a project that might be the best "case" for framing a whole book length tutorial for the docs project. I want to do a kids wagn so there would be two classes of users, the kids using the site to learn and build stuff and the parents/educators who are supervising and creating content together (with the kids in more controlled ways too). We can cover the whole spectrum from chosing a platform (Wagn is the only possibility ) to starting to prototype and have stubs for branches into "agile for wagneers" and stuff like that.
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