The Lab Holiday Sessions - September 2011

Today we held another holiday session with around 17 particpants(a full house).

A couple of older kids left as one in particular wasn't interested, but everybody else seemed to have a good time. At one stage 11 of the kids were on a shared minecraft server, so that was the hit of the day. It was very interesting meeting some of the young people and talking about their interests.

An overview of the room, with the IP address for the minecraft server as well as a message (NO COMPLAINTS, Expect Destruction) which was prompted by some issues in prior sessions.

An angry bird playing minecraft.



An overview of the room, which is on the 16th floor with great views of Melbourne.


This young man wasn't interested in games, just design, and tried zbrush, coming up with some incredible designs by himself, as our 3d designer wasn't there today. This is perhaps an example of what simply giving kids access can achieve - he taught himself a lot through trial and error, not really wishing to do tutorials.


Some of his creations - he ended up making videos of his creations which I unfortunately left behind but hope to recover shortly;

Current activities at The Lab

With everything else happening, it's been a while since I posted an update on what is actually going on in The Lab.

Tomorrow (Wednesday September 28th) we will hold a holiday session with 17 participants at Victoria University on Flinders St. These are more casual sessions intended to reach an audience we can't cater for at the moment.

The weekly sessions continue to run well. A couple of weeks ago we had the judgement of our games competition, there were two winners, and more great entries. I will post them over the coming week or two.

We have now had one young man stop coming, unfortunately I think he was a little more advanced in terms of his skills than most of our group, so he didn't feel he was amongst peers or connect with people. Perhaps this is an issue we can address in the future if we deal with more people or larger groups.

On the positive side, our move means we can now invite back a young man who had a negative experience the first time he visited our previous location and was unable to return. He will be attending the holiday sessions and then most probably some kind of one on one sessions during the week.

Our new home in Maidstone

After Stefan did a mail-out asking for assistance with finding a new venue, we were fortunate enough to be contacted by John Roberts from Just Better Care, a carer agency. He was kind enough to show us through some offices near his own which were formerly occupied by Fletcher Jones, Eastcoast, and Pelaco. He also offered the use of their board room for the parents when they come in.

As well as the agency, the building houses the Vostro Institute, which provides training to industry.

Both of these businesses are very closely aligned with our own. In addition to this, the rent was reasonable, so we spoke with the building manager and organised to rent a space.

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For the past week we have been renovating the space and moving our now quite considerable inventory from Footscray. We were fortunate enough to get some incredible next day service from Pierre at ET Telecom - he helped us with a situation our new provider TPG was going to take weeks to resolve.

We will finish cleaning up the new place tomorrow, ready for our first Lab session on Thursday. I will post some photos of what we have done then.

Here are some photos from before we moved in;

The board room which parent can use;

The entry to the space.


The space.

Farewell Footscray

So, we are leaving Footscray.

In a way I am happy, in another I am quite sad.

The picture above is sticker art found outside our office of two(arguably the greatest two) Footscray icons. The guy the left can be found around our former office at any time from 5am-5pm asking for change(any one of our workers would have been asked many times), and the lady at the atms is a regular fixture. It's sad that after the closure of Forges, this is what Footscray(cbd) is identified with - drugs, and the homeless. It's even sadder when you look at some of the historical photos - you can't help but feel like it's gone backwards over the past 80 or so years. The not so glorious office we have been in used to be a beautiful theatre in the 1930s.

It is an amazing place with some incredible people and so much potential, but it all just seems to be going to waste. I am not sure what the approach of the current governments are but it seems like they want to run it so far into the ground that it is buried and can be reborn. In the meantime there is a tragic amount of human waste.

I hope to return one day.

On the move

Over the past few weeks we have had some issues at our current location, right in the middle of Footscray at the corner of Leeds and Hopkins.
Since we moved in we have watched the local area deteriorate quite a bit - I am not sure if it's a cyclical thing, but the past few weeks have seen police and junkies out in force across Footscray. Combined with several other issues, this has forced us to consider moving before our lease was supposed to be up, at the end of November.
The guy in charge of the building has been very understanding and has said it's okay if we move out by the end of this month, August, so we are now hunting for locations.
On the one hand it's sad it's come to this, but on the other hand we are looking forward to a new start in a fresh environment. This may also allow us to try again with one student who had a particularly troublesome time where we are and has been unable to return.
We appear to have at least one good option lined up which I will investigate early this week, but would be very interested in hearing from anybody else in the west who might have 80+ sq m of office space we can rent cheaply.

Some thoughts on technologists and teachers

One thing I have been thinking about a lot lately is the phrase;
'Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day, teach him how to fish and he'll eat forever.'
This is a philosophy I think most good teachers follow, and I have also followed this in the past when working as a technologist implementing new programs in schools. Part of the implementation is always trying to get the staff up to speed so they can sustain whatever program we are putting in place.
In all of our experiences I can only really think of one case where this has occurred - and in that case it was for ulterior motives. To turn back to the phrase, in that case the guy in question wanted to become a fisherman himself.
In other settings despite massive expenditure and a lot of effort, educators have failed to really engage with these technologies.
As ideal as everybody catching their own fish sounds, it's not sustainable - most of us work long, hard days, and we want to simply turn up at the fishmongers and order what we like. There are so many issues I would have to overcome to go out and catch enough fish to feed my family. It is similar for teachers with technology.
There will always be those who live on the fringes of technological change, or by the sea, who will be happy to do their own development or fishing, but these people are the exception, not the norm.
I believe in future for education and technology to work, there needs to be a clear division of responsibilities. Teachers cannot be expected to learn new technologies on top of their already heavy teaching loads. Likewise technologists cannot be expected to become educational experts overnight. Working out how these two areas can work together is crucial.
For us at The Lab this has some important implications as it leads to the question of how this model, if proven successful by rigorous research, can be expanded to other settings.
One of our original plans was to embed what we have learnt into existing teaching practices, potentially through student teacher placements or talks to groups of student teachers.
In our case with young people with Asperger's, I think perhaps we can assist the teachers in identifying such students, but I am then not so sure about their capacity to deal with them. This requires a very different mindset to traditional education, and even if we do train up student teachers, what is relevant today probably wont be by next year. Engaging these young people takes constant devotion to technology.
What I do think we could help the teachers with, is how they should deal with technology and technologists to achieve their pedagogical objectives. I don't know much at all about teacher courses, but I suspect this is an area which has not been properly explored.