Olafur Eliasson: Succession, 1998. The Art Institute of Chicago, 2000. Photo: Olafur Eliasson https://olafureliasson.net/archive/artwork/WEK101546/succession

Phoebe Washburn: Regulated Fool's Milk Meadow (2007). Installation view, Deutshe Guggenheim. Berlin, Germany. http://www.zachfeuer.com/exhibitions/phoebe-washburn-regulated-fools-milk-meadow/index.html

Daily Tous Les Jours: I Want to have a Conversation. (2014) https://www.dailytouslesjours.com/en/work/conversation-wall

Black Panther Schools. Photo: Getty Images https://rethinkingschools.org/articles/what-we-don-t-learn-about-the-black-panther-party-but-should/

Tesseract

Scholar's Rock (18th century), China. https://collections.artsmia.org/art/104137/scholars-rock-china

Your Extended Learning Garden

Private and public learning territories for pleasure and profit.

Abstract

The garden expresses fusion, secrets, changeability, possibility, and an "exchange between the self and atmosphere." – The Book of Symbols

Your Extended Learning Garden is the smallest viable platform. Just as anyone can grow herbs in the kitchen, Your Extended Learning Garden can be added to any existing institution. A new one can easily be started by anyone, anywhere.

These greenfield learning spaces can be physical, digital, or hybrid sites imbued with the ethos that any productive activity should be guided by ecological mindfulness, blue-sky creativity, and embodied learning. Connectivity is in the air, knowledge encoded into matter.

Your Extended Learning Garden can be a school. It can be a trans-disciplinary team in your workplace. It can be a distributed citizen science project. It can be a niche social network of learners devoted to data visualization, the history of food, or creating social change. They are equally likely to be filled with flowering plants tended by drones as they are to be workshops powered by advanced fabrication technologies, or holographic blended reality gathering spaces.

Gardens can run together, forming amorphous, heterogeneous, collaborative geographies with permutations of central planning mixing with anarchic productivity. Gardens follow the seasons and iterate over time, emerging from the remains of each previous generation.

Grown for profit or for pleasure. They are beautiful. They nourish. And they achieve their purpose without depleting their resources.

What is the difference maker?

• A visionary evangelist for the changing paradigm.
• Network effects of wide adoption.
• Support for teachers/schools/organizations who choose to implement the platform.
• Evidence of a financial, academic, or other benchmarked advantage to adopting new values/paradigms for learning.

<aside> 💡 SCENARIO NARRATIVE

Dispersed and Learning to Adapt

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Key Differences from the Baseline

• From school as the source of involuntary lessons of conformity, submission to authority, structure, aggression, competition, achievement, and self-image; to the garden as a metaphor for learning by doing, influencing the environment to thrive, subsistence, beauty, pleasure, and contemplation.
• New aesthetics, signifiers, and designs for schools and workplaces.
• Increased decentralization and community control, supported by a wiki-fication of standards and curriculum, with assessment and certification moving to the blockchain.
• Project-based learning builds Learner confidence, nurtures engagement and enjoyment of learning, and helps Learners to develop skills for self-directed creativity.
• Workplaces facilitate "composting careers," where workers' experience and knowledge are decomposed and recomposed to provide the basis for growth into new roles and contributions.
• Peer-to-peer learning, matched with mentorship from elders.
• Iterations of 20% Project and Genius Hour initiatives are widespread in schools and workplaces, inculcating a broad culture of continuous innovation and worker/learner engagement.