Recently I’ve met Justus Bruns in Antwerpen. Justus is founder of Times Square Art Square – an incredible art project. When I forst heard about it a year ago, I thought somebody must be dreaming. Justus and his team are planning to replace the commercial ad space at Times Square, New York, with art.

And it seems, it will happen … the first event is in October 2012.

I chatted with him about the “WE” in his work and how this endevour was shaped and grew into what it is today …

Sorry this event was in Germna, therefore I post it in German!

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Gestern habe ich das letzte Vorabevent zum Bundeskongress Politische Bildung moderiert. Im WebTalk sprach ich mit Prof. Dr. Peter Kruse. Nach dem internationalen Ebene in den vergangenen WebTalks mit Birgitta Jonsdottir (Island) und Ellen Miller (USA) wurde sich diesmal die Bürgerbeteiligung auf nationaler und lokaler Ebene gewidmet.

Peter Kruse, der sich als Querdenker und Visionär in Internetfragen einen Namen gemacht hat, sprach über die Beteiligung von Bürgerinnen und Bürgern an politischen Prozessen und die Resonanzmuster in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft.

Ausgehend von der Beobachtung, dass Entscheider einer stetig wachsenden Überforderung durch gesellschaftliche Dynamiken, einen übergroßen Informationsfluss und einen anhaltenden Kampf um Ressourcen ausgesetzt seien, untersucht Kruse die Rolle von (digitalen) Netzwerken. Er plädiert für eine Überprüfung dieser Rolle auf lokaler Ebene, da sich dort der Einfluss auf die politische Kultur besser überprüfen lasse. Weiterhin ist ihm die Unterscheidung der instrumentellen und der normativen Bedeutung von Netzwerken wichtig, da Nutzen und Kritik klarer benennen zu können.

Über diese Zusammenhänge sprach Peter Kruse in seinem Eingangsstatement. Im Anschluss beantwortete er die zahlreichen Fragen aus dem Livechat.

Wir danken Peter Kruse an dieser Stelle für den WebTalk und wünsche allen Interessierten viel Spaß beim zuschauen.

A long time companion of mine, Lutz Berger, did this interview with me on my school project in India … Thank you Lutz!

More information on the school you find here and here.

Please stay tuned, more to come!

We are looking for donations – please tune in!

Our goal is to implement in June, 2012 in Khajuraho two Hole-in-the-Wall learning stations (= two computers, four screens). Hole-in-the-Wall is a surprisingly fresh perspective on the learning process. Breaking the traditional confines of a school, Hole-in-The-Wall takes the learning experience to the playground, employs a unique collaborative learning approach and encourages children to explore, learn and just enjoy!

Khajuraho is a UNESCO World Heritage site and has the largest group of medieval Hindu and Jain temples, famous for their erotic sculptures. In spite of being a tourist attraction, social problems (sanitation, hygiene, health issues, illiteracy, poverty, dirtiness) are obvious in the village with its 25.000 inhabitants.

With the two learning stations and their +400 learning programes we want to tackle the above mentioned problems and to create a positive environment and starting point for the school we are going to be built there soon.

For educators the learning stations are a ‘Shared Blackboard’ which children can collectively own and access, to express themselves, to learn, to explore together, and at some stage to even brainstorm and come up with exciting ideas.

For villagers, it is more like a village well, where children assemble to draw knowledge and, in the process, engage in meaningful conversation and immersive learning activities that broaden their horizons.

And finally for children, it is an extension of their playground where they can play together, teach each other new things, and more importantly, just be themselves.

For 10.000 € we get the two learning stations (see photo to the right) including monitoring and usage evaluation plus community conversations at the beginning, after six months and at the end of the first year.

Thank you very much for your help in advance! Please help us spread the word.

Initiators:
Rajiv Gautam, entrepreneur, Khajuraho;
Ulrike Reinhard, activist, Heidelberg;
Egon Zippel, artist, New York.

We have something for those who donate in return;-)
Please choose between these option or make you own proposal what you want out of this project!
Email it to

ulrike @ ulrikereinhard . com   (without blanks;-)

I’d like to have in return:

• a copy of teh very unusual plan of the land the school will be build on
• a nice postcard from incredible India from the founders of the school: Egon and Ulrike
• some awesome video footage
• closer connection to the students once the workshops have started
• what ever else comes into your mind!!!

Please let us know!

And here is a brand new talk by Sugata Mitra, the guy to started A Hole in the Wall. It#s really worth watching!

Almost 2 weeks ago I’ve had a workshop with 10 friends talking and discussing the school project I am just about to start in Khajuraho, India. We did some brainstorming on how our “dream school” would look like … here are the results …. and here are more details!

When you are reading the following please keep think about what Steve Jobs said 1985 in a Playboy Interview, when he came back from India

“When I came back from India, I found myself asking, What was the one most important thing that had struck me? And I think it was that Western rational thought is not an innate human characteristic. It is a learned ability. It had never occurred to me that if no one taught us how to think this way, we would not think this way. And yet, that’s the way it is. Obviously, one of the great challenges of an education is to teach us how to think. What we’re finding is that computers are actually going to affect the quality of thinking as more and more of our children have these tools available to them. Humans are tool users…”

Up-run campaigning

• why is education important >>> parents >>> “Aufklärung”
• benefits of “learning”
• why is educating kids better than sending them to work from early age on
• identify local needs and problems
• diversity is key for a community to flourish >>> our goal is not (only) to “produce” academics but much more students who are able to solve local problems and by doing so leverage the community standards longterm.
• clear definition of target group

Principles

• preschool – keep the kids close to education >>> keep them curious and creative
• grade 1-12
• certificate which enables the graduates to study
• boarding school
• education for each and everybody, no focus on “girls” or “poor” or “casts”
• focus: to make the Khajaraho community a better place for kids, citizens, seniors, businesses, guests
• school as an open-source-project (what is meant by this? examples?)
• solution-based learning >>> educate the kids to solve local problems
  don’t do reverse planning with the certificate in mind >>> start solving local needs first
• education must be visible, must make benefits obvious >>> overcome hurdles that people say: “school is NOT for me!”
• understand learning/teaching as an organic process, it’s NOT linear
• democratizing the process, leadership within the projects
• educate the kids to become “whole” human beings
• create an environment which allows the kids to flourish the way they choose to flourish!

The School Team (teacher, scholars, educators ….)

• teachers should teach children, not “subjects”
• teachers are like gardeners, they know under which “conditions” students will grow
• their job is to build the environment to let the students grow
• teacher has to inhale the idea and concept of the school
• teacher has to be more than an expert in his topic
• goal: students of Explorer School will become teachers at Explorer School
  huge commitment
• recruitment-process – where to get the teachers and how to make them “stay” with the school

Curriculum

Of course all the students should learn the basics which are necessary to graduate and allow them to study (international) – but beyond this Explorer School will include additional disciplines which primarily focus on the local needs >>> project- and solution-based learning such as:

• Clean Khajaraho – Make Khajaraho a proper place!
• WASH – Water, Sanitary ,Hygiene
• “family” learning, enabling others >>> kids should become able to teach at home what they’ve learnt at school
• tourism >>> e.g. students run a hotel, students as tour guides
• Explorer Store – store in which students sell what was produced at Explorer School
• jewelery
• the use of ICT, access to education, distributing/sharing/open knowledge

Community

• Gautam-family & friends program >>> connect with kids, students who work in the hotel
• No child labour campaign at Gautam mines
• Community-gardens >>> school becomes in various formats part of the village
  school is part of the village and its community, not “just” another building
• parents should be involved
• students and parents can help to build the school, literally
• and they can discuss the curriculum with Explorer School
• self-supporting school

Financing

• barter deals
• tourist charge >>> hotel guest pay 2 USD per night on a voluntary basis for teh school!
• sponsorships, scholarships, government funding
• crowdfunding
• Explorer-Dollars (school-own currency): The idea behind is to introduce a regional currency step by step. If people help building/ teaching/ aso they might (in part) get paid with “Explorers”. With this alternative currency they might do things like to buy school grown food, use the schools infrastructure or buy in partner-shops in the city, that also accept “Explorers”. The reason behind: keep the money that is made inside the region. Develop sustainable food/ service/ aso circles in the region to become more and more independant of the overall economic situation and expensive transportation of goods from the outside.

Ownership

• the schools belongs everybody – literally (stakeholder model)
• the longer a kid stays at school, the higher the stakes
• Alumni idea – commitment beyond graduation

Architecture

• green school (bamboo)
• transparent, open and local architecture
• depending upon the needs of the locals
• “labs” – practical for everyday life
• sports field
• open kitchen
• performance place, theatre and dance
• multifunctional furniture
• check: Wikihouse, Open Source Ecology, Earth ships, Michael Reynolds
  Edubox – School in a box (what is meant by this? examples?)
  include local value added chain
• check “desaster relief” model – Basic School Tent (THW, Hans Jürgen Hirsch, DHL, Henrik Maedler, Achytha Sharma, Bangalore, Sulochana Development Trust)

Ideas fo near future

• Summer Camp (pilot) in Khajuraho
• Design Thinking Workshop at Riverside School with kids from Khajaraho
• Workshops in Khajaraho with kids and parents, potential investors, companies

On behalf of the Bundeszetrale für politische Bildung I’ve hosted a livestream with Ellen Miller, executive director and co-founder of Sunlight Foundation, last thursday. In the up-run of the Bundeskongress Partizipation the Bundeszentrale will have more of such events. Their goal: to get a discussion going on the topics closely related to the event’s theme: participation.

• What does participation mean?
• What does it take?
• Why should citizens participate?
• What influence should they have?
• What are existing examples?
• How can we “learn” participation?

It was a pleasure to start this serie with Ellen Miller. She spans for more than 35 years the worlds of non-profit advocacy, grassroots activism and journalism out of Washington DC. She is a nationally recognized expert on transparency and the influence of money in politics.
Sunlight Foundation is a non-partisan non-profit – dedicated to using the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency.

She gave us a brief introduction on Sunlight’s work and then we really had a lively discussion with the participants. A broad range of questions came up. You can watch the entire live stream here:

Dominik Wind, my friend and colleague at we-magazine, has written an impressive article on the “Kony2012″ issue. You’ll find it here. You really should read it!

And watch this video – an outcry of a young African woman asking outsiders to stop saving Africa. She is an Ugandan journalist, her name is Rosebell Kagumire – she makes some pretty remarkle points on this entire issue!

About 10 years ago I published this 4 kg heavy book: digitale transformationen (in German):

The publication deals with fundamental transformations of art and modern life caused by digital technologies. Theoreticians, artists and scientists express their view along with producers, sponsors and intermediators. They present digital transformations in its manifold functions and with tangible examples as a new aesthetic and innovative research. Art with information technology is about finding and creating images on the basis of communication processes and about conceptual strategies and cognitive methods. The editors Ulrike Reinhard and Monika Fleischmann would like to address not only the traditional cultural sector but to position media art at the interface between technology, economy, science and culture. Their aim is to reach those readers who are willing to appreciate and support this kind of art as an important key factor for new thinking and innovation. Media art shows new views of the world. It reveals how we understand what we see and hear. The texts provide an insight into discourses and artistic practices in the German-speaking region.

Many of the texts are still actual today.

This beautifully designed book contains a DVD on which all texts are available as mp3 files.

Amazaon has to say this about the publication.

Yesterday the printing house called me, that they “found” another 200 copies in their stock!
Together with my co-publisher Monika Fleischmann, Fraunhofer Institute, we decided to give them away for only 10 Euros each (regular price 120.00 Euro) plus packaging and shipping.

So please feel free to order your copy now ny sending an email to ulrike (at) ulrikereinhard (dot) com.

At the Global Citizen Forum we spoke a lo about leadership and how leadership correlates with global citizenship. Does it take leaders to achieve a concept such as global citizenship or is it much more the responsibility of all ourselves to create it?

Here are a few interviews I’ve done with participants who shared their thoughts – some of them incredible stories:

Puja Handa was born in Botswana, her roots are Indian and today she is living in London, UK. She is working as a teacher in the Art of Living Foundation. In this brief interview she is telling the story of her kidnapping and how she “dealt” with her kidnappers and was set free after 6 hours …

Dismas Nkunda is Ugandian. He is — among many other things — Co-Director of the International Refugee Rights Initiative. He became a leader when he was 12 years old … taken over responsibilty for his 9 younger siblings and his mother. His father was shot in front of his eyes.

Oyebisi Babatunde Oluseyi built a network of young people out of Nigeria.