The Collective: A New Culture of Learning pt. 2

In an earlier post, I introduced Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown’s book A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, asking how youth leaders actually get at the internal motivation that, married with access to an unlimited source of information, drives learning.

Here’s another key idea in the book: the collective.

“As the name implies, it is a collection of people, skills, and talent that produces a result greater than the sum of its parts. For our purposes . . . they are defined by an active engagement with the process of learning.

“A collective is very different from an ordinary community. Where communities can be passive . . . collectives cannot. In communities, people learn in order to belong. In a collective, people belong in order to learn. Communities derive their strength from creating a sense of belonging, while collectives derive theirs from participation.

“[Collectives] are content neutral platforms, waiting to be filled with interactions among participants.”

What if youth ministry were viewed in a particular context as a constellation of collectives? What if, instead of The Youth Group, where one Youth Leader was trying to expose all participants to Scripture study, service, spiritual practice, worship, community building, etc., you instead had a collective of students who were participating in service and a collective that was focused on Scripture study, and any number of youth collectives engaging any number of things?

A student could choose to participate in whichever collective appealed to her. She could form a collective of her peers around forms of participation that don’t yet exist at the church.

In our congregation this year, a particular student has gathered a collective of her peers around her to engage issues of hunger. She recruited them to raise money for and participate in a walk. She got them to do the 30 Hour Famine. What that collective does next I don’t know. But I’m sure they’re not done.

I like what the collective suggests. What are the limitations, though? Does this appeal to you as much as it does to me?

Evoking Motivation in Youth: A New Culture of Learning

Mizuko Ito tweeted about a book a while ago, and since her past work leads me to think she’s super smart and to be heeded when she praises a book, I bought it. A thoughtful post by Adam Copeland reminded me of it last week.

A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown is a terrific little read, deceptively difficult given its slim 115 page figure. Thomas is a Communications Professor at USC, where Brown is a visiting scholar.

The book succinctly describes the media landscape that students inhabit today. That landscape is characterized by constant change and “a massive information network that provides almost unlimited access and resources to learn about anything.” The new culture of learning in that environment needs to allow for “unlimited agency [for students] to build and experiment with things” within given boundaries and structures.

It’s a compelling case, and it raises a number of questions for those of us doing ministry with adolescents in churches. The first of those questions has to do with motivation.

Brown and Thomas narrate a number of stories that involve students learning in a way that takes advantage of the massive information network through a deeply personal motivation to learn something, practice something, explore something. So Sam, a nine year-old, learns computer programming by participating in an online Scratch community. Students in a college course about Massively Multiplayer Online Games hijack the lectures to dissect what’s actually happening as they play these games outside of class. A freelance hacker learns all kinds of programming by experimenting with his own programs and using Google to figure out how to improve them when they crash.

In each of these cases, the learner brings a deeply personal motivation to the task of learning. Therein lies my problem.

I don’t know what motivates the adolescents I work with here at the church. The ones who come to a weekly youth group do so why? What do they want to learn? What do they want to master? What do they want to change about themselves and the world? Those motivations are in there, but I’m afraid I don’t know how to get them out. Instead, I bring a curriculum on something I think is important for them to know.

How do those of us who lead students in church settings draw out what motivates them–not just what motivates them to come to church, but what motivates them in life–so that we can help them build and experiment with the massive information network at their disposal to be more faithful people?

It seems to me that the annual flip chart exercise about “what do you want to talk about” doesn’t go nearly far enough. I need some more concrete ways to hear and observe what’s driving my students.

Any ideas?

Program or Be Programmed, part 3: Live in Person

Find POBP part 2 (Don’t Be Always On) here, and part 1 here.

Media is biased outside of time. It promotes interaction that does not depend on the second-to-second interaction of real people but rather depends on sequential commands from those same people in order to carry out any of its tasks.

Media is also biased away from locality. It’s really good at connecting people and facilitating communication across distances (think of the primitive cans connected by string). Consider this:

. . . the bias of media has always been toward distance–that’s part of what media are for. Text allowed a person in one place (usually a king with a messenger running on foot) to send a message to a person in another place. To those with the power of the written word, what was happening far away became actionable, or even changeable. Similarly, broadcast media gave the newly minted national brands of the industrial age a way to communicate their value across great distances. Where a customer may have once depended on a personal relationship with a local merchant, how he could relate instead to the messaging of a nationally advertised product.

For all that, media tend to suck at conveying relationships and messages among people who share a localized space (however, the teenagers texting each other in the backseat of the same car, thus conversing without the awareness of the adults in the car, may be an important counter-point).

The “local” provides a homefield advantage. The real relationships that result from face-to-face interactions among customers or congregants are concrete things that add humanity (and therefore value) to interaction, and that can’t be replicated by media. Recent interactive media platforms like video calling can approximate that interaction, but as anyone who uses those tools regularly knows, it’s not the same thing. It’s not a worse thing; it’s a different thing altogether.

Churches often use media to intensify the local homefield advantage. Printed bulletins allow the whole congregation to say prayers and creeds in unison; graphics and video supplement music and sermons. But does that really do what we think it does?

Rushkoff refuses to use computer graphics to aid in the speaking gigs he’s invited to all over the world, much to the annoyance of conference organizers. Here’s his rationale:

. . . the reason to spend the jet fuel to bring a human body across a country or an ocean is for the full-spectrum communication that occurs between human beings in real spaces with one another. The digital slideshow, in most cases, is a distraction–distancing people from one another by mediating their interaction with electronic data.

Churches love few things more than a good distraction.

This is not to say electronic media ought to be banned from sanctuaries. It’s only to say that we need to know what that technology wants to do–facilitate communication across distance–and to think strategically about whether our use of that technology is actually doing that (Skyping with a far-flung mission co-worker, for instance) or forfeiting the homefield advantage that our being together in the same place at the same time wants to give us.

How does your church use media in worship or education or governance? Are you feeling a pull away from the local in your technology use, or toward it?

Program Or Be Programmed, part 2: Don’t Be Always On

Instead of operating in time, computers operate from decision to decision, choice to choice. Nothing happens between the moments I type any two letters on the keyboard. As far as the computer is concerned, this word is the same as this one, even though I took one second to produce the first, and a full minute to produce the second. The machine waits for the next command and so on, and so on. The time between those commands can be days, or a millisecond.

That’s how Douglas Rushkoff unpacks the asynchronous nature of computers, their programmed bias to operate outside of the flow of time. Thus the first of his Ten Commands for Life in A Digital Age (see an intro to the book here): Don’t Be Always On.

Rushkoff can recall the early days of online discourse, when discussions lasted for weeks at a time on cyber bulletin boards. Users would log in to a website, read all of the comments on a given topic, then most likely log off before considering and then composing their contribution to the discussion. Then, hours or even days later, they would log back in and post their entry. It was slow and deliberative.

Now we don’t need to log in. We’re in a perpetually logged-in state. We don’t have to go get the discussion, because new digital platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and those ubiquitous blog comment sections bring the discussion to us. Our phones and screens bleep and blink with every response to our content. We devour it quickly and then repost/retweet/reshare.

Rushkoff’s analysis of this is solid stuff, and I won’t parrot it here. I’m interested in how this always-on tendency, which runs fundamentally counter to the asynchronous bias these digital programs are all built with, affects ministry. How do pastors, for example, exploit the bias of computers?

“Nothing happens between the moments I type . . . ”

Well, almost nothing. Something is happening in the person to whom my typing is directed. Some anticipation is building, surely, and the longer I stretch those moments out between keystrokes, the more that anticipation builds, the more my Facebook friend will expect from my composition. The more I take advantage of the bias of the digital medium and make it wait for me, the more important what I have to say will seem.

Can the things we need to say in our ministry contexts fit in a thumb-punched email or text? Character limits aside, are we not speaking of the same mysteries our forefathers and foremothers spoke of in abbeys, cathedrals, deserts, and prisons? And don’t these mysteries demand time? Don’t they resist quick replication and summation? I mean, if it can’t wait, how important is it?

Since reading POBP, I’ve switched all of the notifications on my smartphone applications to “off.” I’ll check my emails when I want to, and I’ll respond to them in time. Those tweets aren’t going anywhere, so I don’t need to be alerted the moment they’re posted. And that latest volley in my Facebook debate with my brother-in-law over NPR’s firing of Juan Williams–I’ll get to it when I mean to do some debating, not while I’m listening to the new The Extra Lens album.

My contributions–and therefore my ministry–will come out better for allowing the computer to do what it wants to do–chew up those moments in between.

How do you exploit computers out-of-time bias? Or are you drowning in a wave of status update notifications?

Kenda Dean’s Good News

Kenda Dean’s latest book, Almost Christian: What The Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling The American Church, caught the attention of CNN over the weekend (read Kenda’s thoughtful response here). It’s long since been taken up by the likes of Tony Jones and most everyone else engaged in youth ministry in mainline protestant churches.

Some substantial critiques have been leveled against Dean’s thesis, which is essentially that a lax breed of religiosity among churchgoing teens in America is the fault of the church before it’s the fault of any other villian, like the culture, technology, or any other of the usual suspects. Some have challenged whether her research-backed assessment of levels of teen religious fervor are accurate. Others have challenged her prescription of a fix.

It’s a complex question. Dean’s presentation of the evidence is compelling, if not a little numbing in its depth. She’s no ivory tower-sequestered egghead; she works with teens and with youth workers. She knows whereof she speaks.

Consider this passage. After quoting John 20:19-23 in its entirety, Dean says:

“There it is, in the middle of verse 20: “Then.” An unoticeable word, maybe, unless you are a parent, or a pastor, or anyone who works with teenagers–but there it is, a delayed reaction, the lapse that occurs between telling a teenager she is beautiful and having her believe it; the interval between showing up at the high school gym and having your player, ready for a free throw, notice that you are there; the space between hearin the good news and responding to it. Jesus shows up, speaks up, shows the disciples his scars–then they reacted. A liminal nanosecond in John 20, but a season of life for many of us: the gap between recognizing Christ’s coming and Christ’s sending. Jesus could have grabbed the disciples (or us) by the scruff of the neck, flinging them into the world to proclaim his resurrection right then and there, but he doesn’t. He waits. Between Christ’s coming and Christ’s sending Jesus waits for us to recognize him, and for us to rejoice that God’s good news, after all that we have done to deny it, has come to us. As the dispirited disciples dangle in their God-given in-between, Jesus waits . . . and then: rejoicing! It dawns on them that God’s promise is true, the One they love is alive, the story they are part of is far, far bigger than they ever imagined.

Dean is speaking good news to the church, not pronouncing “Forty days more!” I, for one, am glad to hear it again and to be reminded that youth ministry is far, far bigger than my schedules, talks, devotionals, and visits.

James Baldwin and Beauford Delaney

James Baldwin says of Beauford Delaney, an artist who befriended Baldwin as a youth, “he expected me to accept and respect the value [he] placed upon me.”

Can youth ministry mainly be about this? Cannot all Christian ministry have as a central pastoral task the placing of immeasurable value upon peaople while also cultivating the expectation in themselves that they can accept it, that they are worthy of it, and that they must share it?

Postcard+Email+Text+Letter=Get A Life

My students know about upcoming youth group meetings and special events. Of all the teens not participating, not one of them claims ignorance.

They know about the youth ministry. They’re choosing not to participate. And my shotgun publicity strategy is succeeding only in giving them more and more opportunities to choose against the church, to say, “no,” by deleting the unread email or tossing the postcard in the driveway trashcan.

Doesn’t all this communication reek of desperation, anyway? I mean, if something’s worth going to, I’ll find my way to it; I don’t need a letter, a postcard, an email, and a text message to tell me to go. One of those will suffice, and I may not even need that. It’s as the web-conditioned news consumer told Jeff Jarvis in What Would Google Do? “If the news is important enough, it will find me.”

Perhaps the more formal communication I receive about something, the less important I’ll deem it to be. And don’t kid yourself: texts are just as formal as a piece of mail, especially when they’re sent by a youth leader to a student. At least, they’d better be. If they’re not formal, they’re creepy.

The kids who come to the weekly youth group like what’s happening there. They’re coming, postcard or not. The ones who don’t come have other things they’d rather be doing. I’m fine with that. What I’m not fine with is the realization that my nonstop communication with these non-attenders, apart from being hopelessly ineffective, is most likely intrusive and counterproductive. Each week I invite them to repeat a ritual: pull the neon-colored postcard out of the mailbox, glance at it for just a moment, and decide for the the 33rd time since September, “Nope. Not for me.”