The Mycelium Research Project

By Donald Brackett


“The computer and the internet have changed everything, and we are still attempting to cope with and make sense of their effects in the hope of profiting from technology’s still untapped potential. In an age of accelerated obsolescence, the only skill that can help one survive the technological turbulence is an ability to adapt to the emerging landscape so quickly that it borders on precognition.”

Jim Kinney, Professor, Graphic Design
School of Design
George Brown College



What are teaching and learning in the internet age? How must we adapt to keep up with the ever-accelerating rate of student access to alternative modes and methods of gathering information? These are the core questions at the heart of the Mycelium Research Project. Co-Coordinated by Professor Jim Kinney, IWB Director Luigi Ferrara, and Professor Monica Contreras, the project is a unique experiment in attempting to re-design a fast moving vehicle while still operating it safely at top speed, and all within the necessary parameters. The vehicle in question is the very educational format itself for teaching design in the 21rst century, and the dazzling new electronic means of enhancing its delivery.
The research objective is to creatively adapt and educationally evolve along with the rapidly changing information environment around us, rather than run the risk of technology generously offering us fantastic new opportunities for reaching students but our own tentative grasp of the new systems not being firm enough to fully capitalize on them.
Mycelium addresses that grasp and is actively involved in exploring applications of current and future technologies to the way in which design knowledge is shared and disseminated. The message may remain the same, but the medium is bound to change dramatically. In fact, the medium has probably already changed from what it was at the beginning of this sentence.
Simply put, mycelium refers to the capacity for mushrooms to multiply and yet remain linked by a curious kind of continuum: the mass of tubular branched filaments which at a certain stage produce spores, directly or through special fruiting bodies. It is through the mycelium that a fungus absorbs nutrients from its environment.
Mycelium is vital in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and is an important source of nutrients. Perhaps and apt metaphor for research into both the interconnections and the differences between learning information in the old analog manner and knowledge acquisition in the new digital manner. In short, it could be called developing a kind of pre-cognitive wisdom, one based on strategic expectation and informed intuition, the kind that can help students to teach themselves simply by assisting them in creating and sharing a critical mass of knowledge at a personal and peer level.

Personally, I’ve always been a big fan of pre-cognition. Or at least getting as close to it as possible through the diligent application of the skill of anticipating all future events related to a given project and to finding the easiest and most effortless ways of meeting them.
That’s the first image that comes to mind when imagining how to teach students what they already know, but don’t know that they know. I’m reminded once again of my Game Design Students, who teach me digital game history while I teach them the history of something called English. It seems counter-intuitive but is nonetheless true: they will teach me how to teach them.
At its heart, the Mycelium Project is special because of its implications: young people can learn to adapt so rapidly to technological change that they can teach us the best way to teach them, if we can learn to follow their lead. This means having curriculae that can morph at a moment’s notice in a lateral direction to suit some new system or program. Naturally this implies a seeming reversal of the traditional mentorship role, but it also supposes a wholly new advantage: young people often know what’s happening first in today’s hyper-electronic domains, and therefore they themselves might be ideally placed to help us find the new knowledge-base paradigm with which to best deliver it.
For Jim Kinney, this means being prepared to embrace a new school of thought:
“One where we are all students and teachers and work in a collective fashion to cope with and eventually thrive in this technologically induced maelstrom called popular culture. In this new classroom the traditional boundaries and categories are broken down and re-visioned as a collective cultivation of experiential knowledge sharing that may one day lead to students themselves generating cutting edge applications. Students have latent abilities and prior knowledge and a willingness to experiment with a myriad of new environments and tools and, thus, they constitute a critical resource for both learning and teaching.”
This approach suggests new notions of mastery in a world where Kinney says the tools and techniques of one’s craft change virtually every day and where embracing this new notion of mastery is logically consistent with an ever-changing object of inquiry. Especially when that object involves the very forces shaping one's discipline.
Kinney continues: “We need to facilitate rich, deep collegial interaction by providing the infrastructure and guidance for building and maintaining a resource that will help put our students at the forefront of design applications testing, support and development. I see a day when our students will work with leading technology companies to build, test and support important tools for the designer of tomorrow. This ‘perpetual beta lab” will be a research centre that encourages an entrepreneurial model and puts Toronto at the forefront of the emerging economy.”
It is clearly an experiment in self-directed learning which has great practical value in a global marketplace perpetually in need of new technical interpreters of the electronic message. “The collaboration with Apple last year brought this new model to fruition. First year design students in January and May of 2009 were handed over the controls of a podcast and wiki server to document and structure their experiences in learning through knowledge sharing. This resource, dubbed "The Knowledge Garden" provided the digital equivalent of 40 acres and a mule to the newly emancipated student. They were free to take this resource in any direction that they saw fit.”

The many intriguing directions that resulted were further enhanced by the collaboration between the School of Design and the corporate world, benefiting both parties by real-world testing of the educational use of podcast technology and mobile media. Kinney points out that Apple’s new Podcast Technology is untested in educational markets.
“This project tested the feasibility of using the Podcast technology in design education, thereby creating workflow scenarios for its possible and eventual use in institutional settings. These workflows are envisioned as evolving schematics that will allow for a nimble and rapidly reconfigurable use of podcasts as a means for providing content modules for mobile learners. An evaluation of this technology in applied learning contexts will provide Apple with valuable data on the relative usability and utility of using Podcasts and charting this use for the educational markets of the future.
“This project will provide evaluation data for the use of evolving a service bureau model, expertise and services for markets in education, broadcast/media, and arts/entertainment; the use of collaborative content creation for developing solution expertise construction for design and consultation services; developing and marketing all of the skills above to offer an integrated consultancy to advise clients on how to build accessible mutli-format digital content repositories.”
Long-term research interests will include: 1.RISK-based learning (Rapid Integration of Skills & Knowledge) that reduces the lag phase between software release and instruction; 2. Providing qualitative testing of graphic arts software at the beta phase of development for industry partners; 3. Publishing and distributing state-of-the-art learning objects; 4. Creating and evolving an institutional archive of learning modules; and
5. Empowering students with the ability to build and maintain the capacity to develop a peer-based knowledge base.
In a future posting we will focus on the various practical outputs from this project: blogged chronicles of anecdotes relating to team processes and podcast development; models for collaborative content authoring such as blog/podcast media, workflow structure & dynamics flowcharts and diagrams; and knowledge transfer models for project documentation and expertise sharing. Like most spores, this one moves fast.