But before including them, just want to give an update for the online participants in the course.

We've been really excited by the activity on the Google + Community this past week.

I know someone in the community said that watching the Google + community for this course had usurped all their twitter time.

But actually they felt it was a good trade off, so we're happy that we are providing people some new ways of spending their online time.

For those of us here, we found it really interesting seeing all the communication going on by the thousands of online participants.

I did just want to mention for the online participants, a few things. We still get questions about where to find certain information.

And encourage people in the left column in the Google + community, theres a staff announcements link. And the announcements there

are the ones that we are providing from MIT, so there have been announcements this week for example if you want to post questions

to be asked to Joi and Mimi, we gave the information there how to do it. So you should check the staff announcements for information about how to participate

actively in the course. I put up an announcement which was how to deal with the readings in the spirit of interest based learning that we are talking about

this week. I encourage people if you find some readings you are more interested in, dive more deeply, search for other things on related topics.

If something is less interesting to you, its fine to skim, find the parts that are greatest interest to you. We put the readings out there to try to capture your interest

but look at it and dive into the things that you find most interesting. Also, the weekly prompts to engage you in discussions in your small groups

is also in the left column there. We have the weekly emails are there so thats another place to look to find out about some of the ways of engaging

with your smaller groups. We also know that some of the small groups have been very active this week, other groups there has been less activity

There's some randomness of when we assign people to groups, some groups more active than others. In the staff announcements we have some tips of how

if your group isn't active how to switch to other groups, to find other ways to participate. So take a look at those announcements if you want to find out more.

We've also been really happy how people in the community have been adding new elements to the community. I think we mentioned briefly last week

that Adriano in the community had created a google map of the participants. Here's how it looked, I grabbed it last night, so there's a, it really is a

pretty global community. We've seen people from all over the world. But in addition to this map of the overall online participation, we've seen some where

individual groups are also setting up so they can keep track of where the people in the small groups are. I liked this one where, this was after there were just

two markers, one in Boston, one in Peru. Then there was a comment that said, those two little markers on the map make the world feel a lot more connected already.

So again, people starting to see how they connect within their groups. We've seen lots of different ways that groups are connecting.

I got this photo from a school here in Cambridge, Shady Hill School, where twenty-five of the educators and administrators all signed up for the course.

They are watching together and doing this as part of their ongoing professional development for the educators there.

But its also around the world. Here are some images from Ethiopia where an educator there, John Iglar, organized the marshmallow challenge that we did

that we talked about last week and invited some parents and kids both to do the marshmallow challenge. And then engaged in reflection upon

the different learning styles between the kids and the parents. But they also went a step further. They took some of the readings from the first week at this

session in Ethiopia and made little cut out words and remixed the readings into their own statements about the way they were thinking about learning.

So its just been great to see the ways people are taking what we are putting out there, remixing, suggesting activities for other people in the online community.

Its nice to see that some people are really resonating with the ideas that are in the readings and are being discussed. Here was one quote that I grabbed

from the community. "I just read the reading on formal v informal education. Joi Ito's experience with formal education is so similiar to my own." So it's great that

people are resonating and then discussing their own personal experiences. But we also see a lot of people are confronting with the challenges and theres a lot

of discussion in the online community about what they see as challenges. Like, here's one, says, "I love the whole premise of interest based learning but as

a public school teacher I'm struggling with how to integrate this with the common core standards." Or one from a parent, from a parent's view

"I don't see how any schools in my area could incorporate innovative child lead interest based learning when the state is forcing kids into

standards based box." So people are resonating but also seeing the challenges and i think those are the things that we want to continue the discussion during the

semester. Providing a vision and a better understanding of the vision but also trying to see how we deal with the challenges in bringing these to light.

Reading through the Google + community was great to see many people responding to the prompt about writing about a childhood object in the spirit of

Seymour Papert's Gears. And I just grabbed a few of them. From Maria who talked about getting the watercolor kit from her childhood in Russia but then

emigrating and bring it with her as she came to the United States and about her experiences with the watercolor kit. Or Rosa talking about moving as a

child from Puerto Rico and then her grandmother in the South Bronx giving her a Nintendo system and how that sort of gave her a new entry point into her

new life, of getting engaged and learning a participation in new ways. Others like Helen talking about her love of books and creating separate worlds

through the books of her childhood. One of my favorite inventions was from Jeff whose parents, he wanted to get a typewriter that he saw in the Sears catalog and

his parents wouldn't get it for him so he invented his own typewriter and he says today he now works as a paper engineer, I'm not exactly sure what that means

but it grows out of this early experience of inventing his own typewriter. Then even the presentation, this beautiful poster collecting a variety of different ideas

about Julia's different childhood objects presenting the role that the different childhood objects played with her. And then some people did recognize as we saw

in this quote, how rich it is to ask about childhood objects but to get so much about process. Miriam was sharing. And I do think thats one of the things we most

appreciated although we asked people to share about childhood objects, really what comes out from that is learning about the process of learning and the

relationships of learning. And I think we see this if you go through the community and you see all of these stories, you see so much of it is about the

relationships related to learning, the connections that are a part of learning, the process of learning. But focusing on objects helps bring a lot of that to light.

I think thats another theme of this course, we'll be seeing how focusing on the objects and the concrete can open up to the explorations of the networks that

people are a part of. So with that as background, I thought it might be a good way to start in talking with Joi and Mimi on the topic of interest based learning.

In thinking about, and we have here the picture of Joi and Mimi, again thanks to Mimi for sharing this lovely photo from their childhood. Mimi, to start off by

talking to them about objects of their childhood that interested them, influenced them and as they look back what role those objects played in their childhood

and subsequently. Mimi, do you want to start? Mimi: Oh, either way, sure I'm happy to start because I'm going to implicate Joi and its a little bit hard to talk about

childhood objects and not implicate your brother in that. You know, I was thinking about it, and I loved the stories, i looked a little bit online and I liked the image

of gears but I'm going to go with a girlie example which is the play with stuffed animals that I did when I was a kid. I think that one kind of childhood remixing and

tinkering object that doesn't get enough play because some of the gender dynamics of these discussions are things like doll play. And for me I didn't like the

plastic girl dolls, but I loved stuffed animals and had a big collection. And we would, with my friends and I would drag my brother into this too, create these huge

sort of fantasy narratives and rearrange our living rooms and basements to create these cities that our animals would populate and I think whats interesting

about that is not just sort of the obvious sort of fantasy life that was tied to popular culture and other things that kids can get into through doll play but just all of

the social negotiations and the politics that go into creating shared narratives together with friends and siblings. So I think that was a huge part of early

learning experience that related to interest in things like character and narrative and popular culture but also in a lot of the interests that ended up animating

my learning and professional life subsequently which really had to do with those kinds of social negotiations, how cultures built collectively, how you have to

navigate these complicated relationships and hierarchies like which characters are going to have power in the scenario. So I think it was a really

formative set of experiences for me that is probably, it feels different in important ways too to the idea of tinkering with objects in a more solitary vein.

Mitch: Although in some ways could you say you were tinkering with relationships? It was still a type of tinkering but tinkering with relationships?

Mimi: Oh yeah, absolutely, I mean it was definitely a tinkering and kind of as a side effect of it we would do a lot of construction, we would make these forts and

construct a ton of things but it was all in the service of story and narrative and character development and political negotiation and so the building of things was

around that as opposed to building forts for the sake of building forts. I think that was, its a different process and I think different kids are probably

attracted to the building and making through different entry points. Mitch: Joi? Joi: I kind of struggled because I couldn't remember anything as interesting as gears

that fundamentally changed my cognitive models and I'll just use two different things. The one object that I was very obsessed with when I was very very little

were keys. I collected keys. And to me that wasn't so much, it was more about a philosophy than a cognitive model because to me locked doors were things that

were, was authority in the way of my getting through things and keys were the way that I would get through it. It was kind of whether I had to steal the key from

my dad or whatever, it was a way for me to hack the system that was preventing me from having access. It probably is why I like badges and you don't. I don't

think it really changed the way I thought about the way the world was constructed. Mitch: I'm very struck when you say there wasnt anything as profound as gears.

To me, it does seem profound, I hear you talking about keys and I think of Creative Commons. Joi: Yes Mitch: wanting things to be open. Joi: Yes, there definitely is

a key that is tied to the openness and wanting access and things like that but the other thing that actually wasn't my object but that I remember very clearly was I worked at a company

that was run by a physics-chemist genius named Stan Ovshinsky, he was a high school dropout but he invented the field of amorphous materials, he made

the first amorphous threshold switch, he was a genius, he had thousands of patents and Noble Laureates as friends and he would have these pipe cleaners and

styrofoam balls and he'd sit there and he'd put together molecules and he'd shake them and he'd say, "See these dangling bonds? I bet if we put germanium

there it would increase the proficiency of the photovoltaics." And then you'd have these Noble Laureates scribbling things down saying, " well this

is what it means when you write it in math." But he didn't speak in math, he talked about science by shaking these physical objects and to me that was

why I wanted to become a scientist because I thought science was about this intuitive understanding of things as if molecules were styrofoam and pipe cleaners

That was why university was such a big shock because that wasn't how physics teachers explained things to me and that was how my mentor had explained things to me.

was always physical objects like did the ice cream, making ice cream, he explained how crystals and things like that. So to me the objects of science were

how I was learning about science and then I learned later that that wasn't how it was taught in schools. So that actually to me was very important in my

cognitive development because I thought very early on that all science and technology could be explained intuitively through physical models. And that,

understanding that was how you understood science and I didn't realize that you had to learn it through words and numbers. I still sort of believe that.

Mitch: That really resonates for me. In college, I was a physics major but didn't go on. And what turned me off was in the earlier stages, I could have an intuitive grasp

of everything we were learning and by the time I got into the later years in being a physics major, I could still manipulate the formulas and I could still get the

right answers but I didn't have an intuitive feel and it lost it's appeal to me. Joi: But I would kind of blame the teachers because when you watch the Feynman lectures

and even if you talk to, and even later in life, I was also a physics major that stopped, when I would get really frustrated I remember calling David Adler who was

the head of physics at MIT when I was in high school and said my physics teacher can't explain this to me but I really think this is how it relatively works. And he

would explain it to me in an intuitive way. I think that unless you really understand it, you can explain it in an intuitive way. And what happens is, I think, we have

a teaching system where we scale up to a point where the people teaching don't really have an intuitive grasp so you fall back onto formulae and structure. But I think

the people who actually invent new stuff in physics do have an intuitive model of everything. Mitch: Mimi, this discussion is about intuitive ways outside of the classroom

and how it sometimes conflicts with inside the classroom. Maybe if you could then move forward from your early childhood experiences to classroom experiences.

And again you were in some different disciplines and different domains, but in what ways did you see the connections between your outside of school learning and

your inside of school learning which is obviously a theme in your work today. I would be interested in as you were growing up, what were the connections for you between

outside of school and inside of school? Mimi: Yeah, its kind of interesting growing up with Joi because we were, we are very different learners. I was always what I call sort of a

corporate learner, I did really well in institutionalized instruction and I was what our teachers now call a "pleaser" , I suppose, at school. And Joi was a much more interest

based learner. In a lot of ways the research I'm doing now that is focused on interest based learning. A lot is about my observations of Joi and our differences growing up because

we were very close but we had very different styles of interacting with organizations and developing relationships. I think, for me, the tie was, it wasn't so much a conflict

with what I was doing in school and out of school but I think the formative experience for me was growing up in a bicultural environment where I spent a lot of time

sitting outside culture and observing it and trying to understand how it worked. So in a way, I applied that to what was happening in school. Like if in school you discover

and understand the structure of how, what the expectations are, what the achievements are, how you get recognized, its not that hard to conform if you feel like doing that.

For me, it was always about cracking the social code and figuring out what to do with it. I think a lot of, for me, experiences of being a cultural outsider was really formative to that

Now I think Joi responded to that same set of circumstances in a really different way. I think at the end of the day, interest can be broader than what we usually

think of as passion based learning. It can be interest in the sense of relevance to your life. The thing for me understanding culture was about survival growing up.

I had an extreme interest in it because its was highly relevant to what I needed to do to survive as a foreigner in a baffling culture and we would move back and forth