Collaboration and Reciprocity, Habituation and Holisticism, and the Cultural Capital of Creative Lifelihood

Whether peer and near-peer learning communities unite around, evidence a joint-undertaking process between learners and more experienced practitioners. OMG!’s fundamental language evoked this: both campers and counselors were called directors from the moment the camp began, a system that. On the first day of the camp, selections of the directors’ work were played, meant to provide fodder for ideas or curiosity about specific techniques.

 The second day, the kids were like, ‘We did that special effect yesterday, I want to do this and that. The amount of response that we had to this method of working with kids was way different to anything I’d ever seen before in any tutoring or teaching situations,” he said. “It was because we had groups of five kids.

By the third day everyone was on board, and it was literally collaboration rather than top-down instruction. They’re learning by doing as opposed to learning by teaching.”

In its weeklong life span, OMG! displayed every facet of this kind of networked collaboration, which doesn’t just stop at letting younger partners make decisions but demands full “reciprocity” 20 in multiple directions: feedback not just between learners and near peers but between peers themselves; an onus on more experienced practitioners to share knowledge with, experiment with, and give guidance to their less experienced peers; providing the self as audience.

The example of OMG!—of Gen Y creative professionals retracing their learning by reaching out to digital native tweens and adolescents—provides a significant lesson about content. In education in the digital era, just as in digital entertainment, production, and communication, the most fungible component is content. The irreplaceable components are processes—how to search, how to learn—and function best when they are selfmotivated or motivated by interest-based networks that feel only marginally removed from the borders of the self.

Here you can see part of the work realized by the campers and directors of the OMG everywhere organization:

https://youtu.be/6HVNOBgqyG0