DIY U by Anya Kamenetz

Author:Anya Kamenetz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

— five —

INDEPENDENT STUDY

Educational futurists fall into at least three guilds, to borrow the term from David Wiley’s open online class. The ones in the last chapter— the artisans, let’s say—write statistical reports and testify before Congress. They seek applications of technology within colleges to lower cost, increase access, and improve learning. Now for the monks and the merchants. The monks write blog posts packed with old movie clips and argue late into the night in pubs after conference sessions. They want to liberate knowledge and scholarship from the university altogether. Then there are the merchants, who wear ties and drink Coke Zero with venture capitalists. They see the need for change within the academy as an opportunity for profit.

The monk’s world starts with a toaster.

Well, not quite a toaster. What Thomas Thwaites exhibited at London’s Royal College of Art in the summer of 2009 was a couple of leafblowers, a suitcase full of chunks of iron ore, and a microwave, with which he had managed to smelt a piece of pure iron “about the size of a ten-pence coin.” The Toaster Project was a solo attempt to fabricate, from raw natural materials, the same Chinese-made appliance that sells in British stores for £3.99 ($6.60).1 Thwaites took his cue from sci-fi humorist Douglas Adams, who in his novel Mostly Harmless wrote of the average modern human, “Left to his own devices, he couldn’t make a toaster.”2

In his artist’s statement, Thwaites wrote, “It’s about scale, the total inter-reliance of people and societies, the triviality of some (anti) globalisation discourse, what we have to lose, and DIY.” To translate: The chain of industrial processes, transportation miles, and person-hours that snakes behind even the simplest object is invisible even to the best-educated among us. Living within this invisible matrix is profoundly alienating. We ignore the cost to the environment and the fate of the people around the world who serve as cheap labor to make our cheap products. DIY is one possible response.

Not explicitly educational, the Toaster Project nevertheless illustrates two basic strategies important to DIY education. The first is to seek out the vividness of direct experience, to encounter the world, and, if possible, to make yourself useful. Henry David Thoreau argued for a Toaster Project approach to education. Students, he wrote,

should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. . . . Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month,—the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this,—or the boy who had attended the lecture on metallurgy at the Institute in the mean while, and had received a . . . penknife from his father? Which would be more likely to cut his fingers?3

The second strategy is to share information with a community. I found out about the Toaster Project on Google Reader, a free application.

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