#indigenousdx

IDX is a big idea—big aspiration, big goals, big challenges. As part of the National Centre of Indigenous Excellence, we have aspirations to promote and support IDX nationally.

But we know (from hard-won experience) that if we try to do that straight off the bat, there’s a high likelihood we’ll get it wrong.

While we encourage prototyping and “safe failure”, we don’t want to stuff it up at the big picture level.

We’ve used the phrase “Think big. Start small. Scale fast.” before.

You may have noticed that a lot of our recent activity has been happening at the IDX Hub, in Redfern. This is not because we intend to stay here or we’re focused only on Sydney-siders (or urban dwellers for that matter).

It’s part of this approach to doing business—the “Start small” part. We are testing our early ideas in the Hub to learn what works, what doesn’t, how we can improve.

Every workshop we learn something that goes into the next one. Every workshop we add a few more things to try and test. New materials. New partners. Different technology. Each iteration adds something to the mix, increasing complexity. And sharing learnings as we go.

Over the recent series of posts I’ve been posing some questions about the nature of IDX and what we might aim for.

Reflecting on these questions may make sense of some of our early efforts here at the IDX Initiative: the MIT Scratch and robotics workshops for example; our thinking re: the Raspberry Pi for the Indigenous Remote Media Festival; our plans to trial other workshop ideas based on technologies.

We think each of these offers the potential of being an engaging and meaningful way of moving from the usage of digital technology, to making digital technology (the “3” scale for Usage and Device in the AUDIO framework).

We’re believers in the ethos of “Think big. Start small. Scale fast.” (A phrase our friends at TACSI introduced us to, attributed to Saul Kaplan.) These early experiments (we’ve labeled these early workshops prototypes very deliberately) aim to establish whether these approaches:

are of interest to, and valued by, community

are effective in inspiring ongoing engagement in digital technologies (in general)

are effective in encouraging more in-depth discovery, exploration and learning of digital technologies (e.g. making)

translate into increased engagement with formal education pathways (this is not an essential outcome, but a key question we think we need to understand)

We don’t know if the answer is a definitive “yes” or “no” to any of these points at this stage (in fact, we expect to learn a lot through our early engagements about the nuance of what works/doesn't, where the value is seen etc.). In the spirit of Lean Startup we are asking and learning in doing—trying out different approaches and seeing where the communities we’re working with guide us.

But we hope that by sharing our learnings, in line with our commitment to legible practice, will contribute to our collective understanding of if/when/how they are useful in advancing IndigenousDX.

The Broadband for the Bush Forum went really well by all accounts, and seems to have made a little bit of a splash more widely with the #bushbroadband tag trending on Twitter on day 1.

We’ve received some great feedback about the “Digital making for engaged learning” workshop that Zoe co-facilitated with Nicolette from DigitalCareers/NICTA, Mel from ThreeFarm/Makers Place, and Kelly from Code Club Australia.

Slides from the session are embedded below—incl. contact details for all speakers (on the final slide) for anyone that would like to know more about the different opportunities outlined in the session.

"Digital Making" for engaged learning workshop from IDX Initiative

But the session was far less about the slides and presenting, and more about hands-on tech. We had about 20 participants working around a number of stations where we had LEGO robots, MIT Scratch, Ozobots, and me3D printers setup.

Zoe Betar demonstrating LEGO robots at Broadband for the Bush

This was the first trip for a trial/test 3D printer that we now have at the Hub. We have yet to arrange a flight case etc., which made for interesting considerations around making our way through airport security!

Zoe + Mel Fuller prepping for the 3D printing demo

April Long checking out the über cute Ozobot robots demoed by Nicolette Venn from Digital Careers/NICTA

NCIE’s April Long joined the Forum to co-present on the IDX vision—an overview of the concept and a little bit on what we’ve been up to with robotics, 3D printing, [MIT Scratch and Makey Makeys. While some of the content may be familiar to regular readers, there were some new insights from recent research into digital careers that may be of interest. Our presentation deck below:

Introduction to Indigenous Digital Excellence from IDX Initiative

We also attended the Indigenous Focus Day held prior to the main Forum. Zoe and myself were privileged to facilitate break-out sessions across the day, which was a tremendous opportunity to learn about the opportunities and challenges being tackled by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across the country.

There were a number of highlights across the day—Joe Morrison’s opening keynote and Mikaela Jade’s eye-opening session on mobile + wearable technology and sharing of information, and the inspiring story of the benefits of tablet computers being deployed by the MJD Foundation (with the support of the Telstra Foundation):

There were a couple of video submission bringing the voices of community members that were unable to attend in person at the session.

Did you catch IDXer Michael Rome on Koori radio last Thursday? With muru-d’s Annie Parker, he shared his thoughts on the up-coming Pathway to Digital workshop they’re running in July.

If you missed it, you can get some of Michael’s thoughts in his blog post on getting an idea off the ground. And don't forget that we're offering up to $1,000 for 5 people to contribute to travel and accommodation costs for participants who are based outside the wider Sydney region.

Last week was mostly a week of planning and reflection. As part of our evaluation process, we have regular team retrospectives (based on the Scrum management framework). We also do a review of each workshop/activity that we run as a team, looking for opportunities to improve.

One of the things that stood out for me is the importance of getting the little things right—the mechanics of a workshop are really important to a successful outcome. Little things like the mats we used causing some of the robots to bump off course mid-task, or something as basic as the choice of electrical tape we used to mark out the challenge courses.

These little things can have a big impact on participants—the difference between achieving an early success, or being frustrated by the process (and potentially reinforcing previously held beliefs towards the difficulties of technology use).

Our evaluation process provides mechanisms for us to capture this sort of data, as part of our continuous improvement approach. But these are also the sorts of things we intend to document when we start to share the workshop outlines for the activities we’ve been undertaking.

Well, a bit of radio silence the past few weeks—not for lack of activity (quite the contrary).

Zoe has been continuing our work with Mel from ThreeFarm and Matt from Me3D to put together our first 3D printing workshop, to be held on 2 May at the IDX Hub in Redfern. We’re hoping to have 12 participants for this initial workshop, and there’s some spots still available. A quick outline (from the workshop flyer (PDF 964KB)):

The NCIE has teamed up with Three Farm and are offering young people aged between 14–18 the opportunity to take part in a full day 3D printing workshop—valued at over $250 per person—for free!

The workshop is a chance to get creative and express Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture in a unique way.

If you’re interested, please let Zoe know as places are limited (and filling fast). Michael’s been putting together a panel for the Australian Internet Governance Forum scheduled for October later in the year. We’ll have more on that closer the date.

On the tech front we’ve been running some experiments with the Appgyver cross-platform development framework with some success. While we’re still very early days, it’s looking very promising as a framework for our ongoing development efforts moving forward.

We’ve also been busy reviewing candidates for the Community Connector and Innovators’ Lab Program Designer roles we’re currently advertising. We’re still accepting applications, so if you or someone you know would be a great addition to the team, please get in touch…

You may have noticed that the early workshops and activities we’ve been undertaking we use the term “prototype” a lot. (And I’ve written previously about a potential way to distinguish a “prototype” from a “pilot” etc.)

It may seem like semantics, but we use this term very deliberately.

I find that often I let “getting it right” get in the way of “getting it done”. Holding onto things until they’re “ready”, only to set them free in the world and discovering something critical that was missed. Something I could have learned early, had I not spent so much time polishing, refining, “perfecting”. Something that would have changed the trajectory of what I did, had I realised. But then it may be too late, too expensive, too invested…

A prototype tests a smaller part of the overall solution. Creates an “experiment” to test an hypothesis. A prototype can fail safely. Without doing harm. Without costing too much. Prototypes help us to learn quickly. To “fail early, to succeed sooner”.

So when you hear us talk about prototypes, this is what we mean. We know that we don’t have “the solution” yet, but we have an hypothesis we think is worth testing, to learn, to evolve.

Does that make sense? Is that distinction helpful? Have you heard/used other language with a similar/same intent? What do you think are the benefits/challenges with prototyping?

As the driving force behind the robotics workshops we’ve been running, we invited Liam Ridgeway to share his perspectives on the first robotics workshop we ran late last year.  We hope you find Liam’s thoughts helpful, and we'd love to know what you think… ^GY

Late 2014 I (Liam Ridgeway), with Dr Robert Fitch (from the Australian Centre for Field Robotics) and the Indigenous Digital Excellence (IDX) team, ran our first Indigenous Robotics Workshop program for kids aged 8–12 in the IDX Hub at the National Centre of Indigenous Excellence (NCIE) campus in Redfern. 

The workshop is the first of many and is aimed at giving kids more exposure to Science Technology Engineering & Mathematics (STEM) through an interactive workshop where the kids build and play with LEGO robots.

On the day we had 19 students from Glebe Primary School attend the workshop. We had 10 mentors that were spread across the student groups. Students and mentors enthusiastically gathered at 9:30am, buzzed for the day’s activities.

They were given an introduction to the workshop and what we were doing for the day and how this tied back to Culture.

They were then treated to an introduction to robotics by Robert, who showed the kids all the different ways that robots are used in everyday life.

Students were then split into groups of two (and one group of three) and assigned a mentor.

The mentors also had a really great day and the feedback was really amazing and also very constructive.

The kids worked in pairs and each pair had a mentor. As part of the workshop they had to come up with a team name.

Throughout the day the students were awarded stickers and certificates for completion of tasks, effort and good behaviour.

At the end of the day mentors came together to nominate and vote for students to receive certificated for students who demonstrated good behaviour, great results and most improved, and all students got to walk away for a chocolate, which even the big kids (mentors and teachers) were very excited about.

About the workshop content

The learning components of the workshop were structured to flow across the day, with an introduction to robotics concepts, followed by tasks related to the building and programming processes, which were then combined into a culturally-infused “challenge” task for the kids to practice (and demonstrate) the things they’d learnt.

We started by teaching the kids how to build a basic LEGO robot so they could become familiar with the different pieces of the robot.

We then moved onto teaching the kids how to command the robots to move using software to program into the robots memory to move in different directions.

The last activity of the day involved the children building a more complex robot which they would build and then program to move around a course with obstacles. The course was designed around significant landmarks across and territories within the Eora Nation.

This latter point highlights one of the things we’re committed to in the program—to meld a Cultural perspective with the digital learning activities.

We had so much great feedback from the students on the day asking to come back again. We also had a student say they wanted to study engineering and robotics at the university level. I was delighted to hear this feedback because this is exactly what I hope we can achieve with this program by using the robotics workshop as one of the many paths which exposes kids to opportunities in digital technology and STEM.

Based on this early success, we will be running our second pilot workshop in May and are looking to host more robotics workshops throughout the year. We also hope to find a group of students from our workshops who would be interested in creating a team to compete at the FIRST LEGO League Robotics competition.

The driving force behind the IDEA Summit, held in June 2013, was to better understand:

How might Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people leverage digital technology to increase wellbeing for themselves and their community?

When the Indigenous Digital Excellence (IDX) Initiative was announced at the Summit, the NCIE’s and Telstra Foundation’s hope was that we could build upon the important learnings and insights from participants at the Summit to see IDX thrive.

The key themes from the summit (as outlined in Summit summary report (PDF 2.2MB)) are an example of what participants highlighted as being critical for success. The project ideas that were workshopped at the Summit also provided important clues as to what was important to community, and what IDX might look like in practice.

A number of co-designers at the Summit were invited to expand on their thinking in the form of a series of essays—entitled Making the Connection—that were published in December last year (2014). While we view these essays as an important contribution to the dialogue surrounding IDX, since the authoring of those essays (which occurred in the months proceeding the Summit) we have had the opportunity to dive more deeply into the topic of Indigenous participation in the digital economy, primarily through the activities of the IDX Initiative.

We’ve shared a lot of this thinking (and its evolution) as we went, in conversations with dozens of people in community, but also on this weblog—things like the 3Ps model and AUDIO framework, for example. And we’ve also had some ideas and thoughts around objectives for how IndigenousDX can be fostered and thrive.

We’ve collated these thoughts into a discussion paper—The Indigenous Digital Excellence Vision—which is now available for download (PDF 937KB) from the IDX website (or we have printed copies that are available by request).

The document is structured in three parts. Part 1: What is IDX? sets out to create a more robust definition of what IDX is. Part 2: How can IDX thrive? presents one perspective on how we might bolster examples of Indigenous Digital Excellence, and get to a point where we can develop and implement robust policy (in the context/form of a National IDX Strategy). Part 3: Background and context pulls together the case for Indigenous Digital Excellence: why we think it’s important, what we know to date, our journey so far, and the type of outcomes the expression of IDX might achieve.

Reinforced throughout is the fact that we see IDX as a reflection of the great work that’s already happening in community, and that we hope to see gain greater support (like the Yijala Yala Project, pictured in the excerpt from the paper above). So we’ve also highlighted a number of examples what we consider are examples of IDX in practice across the paper. We know that a lot of effort has already been put into this goal in the community—some folks we know have been working in this space for decades. So, for some of you at least, elements of what’s outlined in this document may not be all that new.

What we hope we have achieved, though, is a clear articulation of the opportunity that IDX represents, what it means, and ultimately to inspire a diversity of action and greater support into IDX-related projects. To see IDX grow and advance, with organisations and individuals across the country getting behind (and benefiting from) the concept, not just through our actions, as an Initiative.

As Jason Glanville, CEO of the NCIE, says in his opening remarks:

The NCIE is excited to be at the forefront of IDX, but we know it’s something that is much bigger than us. It is about our people and our communities. We developed this paper to continue the conversation and to encourage more thinking, more creativity and more engagement in pursuing excellence.