Children go to parks to play with their friends, to enjoy a safe environment where the moment-to-moment operations of society aren’t dominant. In a sense, a playground is a place of intention. Space set aside for a specific activity: being playful.

‘Grown-ups’ have various types of playgrounds, from parks and open space to cafes and bars.

I want to start a new type of playground for ideation and collaboration. A series of parks across the city with whiteboards, notepads, and prototyping material. If my friends and I were going to work on developing an idea, we could go here. Or you might go hang out there are participate in brainstorms with other people as they came by. Some people might leave behind ideas and others might extend them. It would be a literal creative commons.

You could imagine a mechanism for cities, governments, families, or individuals to deposit challenges that need brainstorming. If I have time after work I could go here and work on a problem that someone in my community is facing.

Having these spaces would help to create a culture of innovation, creativity and mutual assistance. One where such activities are valued by giving them space and time in our communities. It would support people in being proactive problem solvers, and looking towards the future rather than (only) being concerned with the present. It would say that we are all invited to actively create the world around us.

What is the difference between what an academic paper offers, and what a science fiction story offers, besides a prototype? Both are mechanisms to communicate a new idea; both require the authors to convince their readers of something which those readers do not yet accept, to create a vision of the world in which their idea manifests, and to show that is has specific properties or outcomes.

What if you had a journal of scientific ideas woven around fictional stories and characters? Where your job was to convince your readers of the validity of that story, and the technical details just happened to be plausible.

Two variations

1. Peer reviewers would get to decide the ending of the story. If they like your story, they could leave it as is. If they don’t, where a traditional journal would reject the paper, here the reviewers could modify the ending to have the main character, say, wake up from a dream and reflect on all the ways the idea didn’t make sense– or modify it in any other way the editors deem appropriate. stories could be continued by others or forked, creating multidimensional ancestral trees of ideas.

2. Different journals might each have their own fictional world in which every story (paper) takes place. The world represents the common starting assumptions of the journal editors. It might be a virtual world (a la second life or world of warcraft), or a conceptual world such as the meta world set up by Neal Stephenson and friends for their ongoing serial book the mongoliad. Scientists’ new ideas would be formulated such that they could be incorporated into these worlds– perhaps they are games– either as a software tool or a concept, and then tested by players or characters in that world. These worlds form a spectrum, from highly esoteric special-interest groups to, in the limit, deploying these ideas in our own “real” world.

This approach to science involves people as player-testers, extends the model of citizen science used in projects such as SETI at home and others. It is something they could have a reputation in, possibly even get paid for. new ideas and concepts would be subject to actual use and testing in these worlds, raising the bar of prototypes from throw-away code to alpha releases others can use (or extend).

There are interesting social hacks/incentives around publishing, too, if you have to let go of what the ending to your story might be. How confident are you that your characters or their ideas wouldn’t be killed off by the editors or other players? There is social capital at stake.

It also has the effect of coupling science more tightly with the nature of our social structures. Social structures are now re-cast as experimental environments for us to explore and see where things break.

Some notes on getting a custom theme to work with octopress. not elegant or clean by any means. my use case was a site with pages only and no blog. so the resulting theme doesn’t have templates for comments, blog posts, etc. but all that can be found in the classic theme that comes with octopress. the process below shows you how to gut the existing octopress theme and get your own working. at that point, you’ll basically be where you were with jekyll in terms of theming, but with plenty of stuff you can copy from the classic theme, and all the other nice additional functionality of octopress. for my custom theme, i used the awesome html5 boilerplate, so i go through the basic of mapping that into octopress’ structure below.

Getting it to install

• hack the Rakefile just a wee bit: copy the existing ‘install’ task near the top of the file, to a new task called install_simple. install_simple is almost exactly the same as install, except that it only copies the theme’s source directory, without worrying about the sass directory (since in my case i’m not using sass). you could also make a conditional clause in the existing install task, or take some other approach. there’s plenty of ways to do it, this was just my first hack at getting it working.

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desc "Initial setup for simple Octopress theme: copies the custom theme into
the path of Jekyll's generator. run rake install_simple[theme_name]"
task :install_simple, :theme do |t, args|
  if File.directory?(source_dir) || File.directory?("css")
    abort("rake aborted!") if ask("A theme is already installed, proceeding will overwrite existing files. Are you sure?", ['y', 'n']) == 'n'
  end
  # copy theme into working Jekyll directories
  theme = args.theme
  puts "## Copying "+theme+" theme into ./#{source_dir} and ./css"
  mkdir_p source_dir
  cp_r "#{themes_dir}/#{theme}/source/.", source_dir
  mkdir_p "#{source_dir}/#{posts_dir}"
  mkdir_p public_dir
end

Philipp asks how we can scale learning, and discusses two axes that P2PU is pursuing: peer-based learning, and an emphasis on challenges over courses.

Imagine the learning ecosystem as a graph, where learning challenges are nodes, and the edges between nodes represent the various ways these challenges can be combined. this is essentially a break down of the monolithic course concept into smaller, atomic components. by doing so, we increase the possible ways these components can be combined, leading to a more diverse ecosystem of learning opportunities.

in peer-based learning, the more traditional constraints on who can be a so-called ‘teacher’ are removed. since we are creating a graph reprsenting pathways to learning, these peers represent additional nodes in our graph. they also increase the combinatorial possibilities in the system of learning.