An enabling environment significantly expands its participants’ capacity to do things they find meaningful and important.
Schools ostensibly aspire to this purpose, but Educational objectives often subvert themselves in large part because Enabling environments’ activities directly serve an intrinsically meaningful purpose. In general, Enabling environments focus on creating opportunities for growth and action, not on skill-building.
Many other social institutions represent powerful enabling environments. Highly functional corporations are often great examples of enabling environments. In these organizations, new employees might feel far more personally capable than they ever had before, even after many years of experience. Likewise, Y Combinator is an enabling environment.
Great software environments are enabling environments. Photoshop expands experts’ range of artistic expression and unlocks previously-rarefied photo enhancement techniques for novices. Software development tools enable teenagers to make games and distribute them to millions at zero marginal cost. By contrast, Most games aren’t enabling environments, and Educational games are a doomed approach to creating enabling environments.
Books and videos rarely deliver here: Mass mediums are typically bad at helping people translate ideas to practice.
A collection of densely-connected Evergreen notes can be an enabling environment for the author: Evergreen note-writing helps insight accumulate. (See also Evergreen note-writing as fundamental unit of knowledge work)
Enabling environments are generally authored, but Powerful enabling environments usually arise as a byproduct of projects pursuing their own intrinsically meaningful purposes. Authored environments are significantly colored by authors’ motivations; that often means Powerful enabling environments focus on expert use.
Designing new enabling environments can be framed as designing a University++
Challenges in authoring enabling environments:
Some mechanisms for designing these environments ==TODO expand into notes:==
When thinking or doing something new and challenging, one common failure mode is that the smallest possible incremental step might still be too difficult to conceive. In these instances, it’s best to adopt an environment which will erect cognitive scaffolding to support part of the cognitive load, enabling that next step. As the actor builds capacity, the scaffolding can be gradually removed, either by him or by his environment. The temporary nature of the scaffolding makes this a subset of mechanisms for augmenting cognition.
Scaffolding is usually authored. Occasionally unauthored scaffolding occurs; for instance, a series of gradually deepening tide pools might provide a great natural environment for learning to swim.
Authored scaffolding may be static or dynamic. Books often include static scaffolds like narrative (Narrative as cognitive scaffolding) or constraints (Constraints as cognitive scaffolding). A static Participatory environment (like a workbook or Make Magazine) may also include carefully-authored sequences of activities (Fine-grained task progressions as cognitive scaffolding).
Dynamic scaffolds can be more powerful because they behave and respond to learners. Great teachers maintain highly dynamic scaffolded learning environments in their classrooms—sometimes almost invisibly, nudging and steering conversation to keep support salient to fade it as learners grow.
One common type of dynamic scaffold is simply a static scaffold, continuously adjusted in response to actors. In this sense, dynamic scaffolds are a superset of static scaffolds.
One particularly important type of dynamic scaffolding is metacognitive supports. Among media forms, games are particularly effective at supporting metacognition. See Metacognitive supports as cognitive scaffolding and Metacognitive supports require dynamic, participatory environments.
Scaffolding is often discussed in the context of Cognitive load theory and Cognitive apprenticeship.
When engaging with a new skill or concept for the first time, it’s important to break it down into so that you can take a tractable first step. Unfortunately, that factoring process is itself quite taxing, which may interfere with the object-level material. If the concepts are sufficiently foreign, you may not be able to break it down at all.
Fine-grained task progressions, provided by an expert, can help create Cognitive scaffolding. For example, if you wanted to learn to program, an expert might suggest you first copy a Processing program which says “Hello, Bob!,” then that you might alter the program to print your name instead of “Bob.” Then they might present three different next programs for you to copy and remix: e.g. animating the text across the screen, printing a message multiple times, using color. And so on…
Game designers are particularly good at this (Cook, 2007). The Witness is a great example: each puzzle unfurls one tiny new element of an unfamiliar skill. Later puzzles introduce combinations of those skills incrementally, until finally you’ll find yourself intricately weaving a dozen different new mechanics in creative ways.
Constraints are one way to construct these progressions (Constraints as cognitive scaffolding).
Cook, D. (2007, July 19). The Chemistry of Game Design. Gamasutra. Retrieved from https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/129948/thechemistryofgamedesign.php
Thekla, Inc. (2016). The Witness. Berkeley, CA.
If you were new to Photoshop and I presented its entire interface immediately, you might have difficulty taking a first step. But you might feel more comfortable if you began in a “welcome” workspace with most of the panels and tools hidden. Then you could reveal each piece of the interface as you discovered that you needed, or in response to your curiosity about something.
Similarly, when explaining a new concept, it’s often helpful to begin with a constrained version of the problem. For example, when explaining how to make and balance vinaigrette, you might initially focus on a single oil/acid pair.
In video games, players often begin with a small set of abilities, or in an environment where some types of challenges never appear. This makes the game more tenable at first.
Constraints are one way to construct fine-grained task progressions (see Fine-grained task progressions as cognitive scaffolding), but they don’t have to be used this way. For example, an aspiring photographer might constructively spend an entire year shooting with a fixed aperture, focal length, and ISO, adjusting only the shutter speed.
Related: Constraints often breed creativity