Marveling at Matryoshka dolls/boxes
There is a stir in Forwardthink. MySciLife, our finalist entry in the Digital Media and Learning Competition, is complete, including this video. One of these days I’ll upgrade our version of WordPress so we can simply embed it here. But for now…go take a look.
The town of Forwardthink is abuzz during these final days before the deadline for videos and proposed budgets. Who will “win”? Who knows!? But the process of imagining, thinking through, and visually explaining a whole new way of learning using digital media has Innovators twisting every digital knob, mashing together different types of files, converting, combining, and clickety-clacking mice or smooth, glassy touchpads in their excitement. And we are the”old people” who are trying to give the real students a chance to learn this way. What a wonderful, nesting Matryoshka doll/box of learning: we learn how to show our ideas so real students can say it even better outside our 
carefully crafted box. Their box of learning is actually the larger one that envelopes our vision and grows yet another and another layer. We “innovators” have carved a small but beautiful vision, the smallest inner seedling of a doll/box. The best thing that can happen is for students to encase it in their own, more artful ideas.
Back in Forwardthink, we Innovators are busy marveling at how pretty our starter Matryoshka doll/boxes are. We hover about the Town Hall doors. The Elders have not even told us when to expcet The Announcement. The Wise Crowds are still busy sharing their insights. And we wait to learn:
In a tug of war between the wisdom of the crowd and competition, who wins?
I think it’s the Matryoshka dolls of learning who ultimately win. We are just part of the process.
