Open Learning: Lessons from Building the Unboxing Tech Toolkit

Open source is usually understood through the lens of software, code repositories and developer communities. However, the same principles including openness, shared ownership, iteration based on community feedback, and resources built to be adapted and reused apply just as meaningfully to educational content. This workshop will explore the Unboxing Tech Toolkit (UTT), a series of toolkits designed for youth to develop a healthy relationship with technology and safely navigate the hyper-digitalised world they inhabit as a case study in building knowledge commons.

In doing so, the workshop will invite participants to reflect on a broader question for the FOSS community- how do we build knowledge commons that are iterative and contextually relevant to the needs of their users. 

UTT is designed to help young people develop a healthier relationship with technology by understanding how the internet and AI function as physical, environmental, and socio-technical systems. 

The latest module of the toolkit traces how data travels through devices, cables, satellites, and data centres. It unpacks the energy, water, and other material costs behind everyday digital actions such as a search query or video streaming, and looks at the people, institutions, and governance structures that keep the internet running. The module also introduces participants to existing examples of community led and owned internet infrastructure like bamboo-built network towers in Indonesia, Mexico, and India or solar-routed web hosting. Alongside these, it draws on indigenous frameworks of regenerative design and harmonious use of technology as alternative ways of thinking about technological infrastructure that predate the extractive models the internet currently runs on.

The toolkit is an open educational resource and is released with facilitator guides in multiple languages so that educators and facilitators across regions can adapt and run it in their own contexts. It has been piloted across India, Cambodia, and the Philippines with over 410 participants and has been translated in various languages, including Khmer, Filipino, Kannada, Hindi, German. In the latest module of this toolkit, the translations in Khmer were done using community-led transla-thons, where workshop participants and volunteers in Cambodia translated toolkit content into Khmer to localise it. Pre and post workshop evaluations for this toolkit consistently showed measurable shifts in understanding and motivation to act. 

This workshop will be conducted in two parts. 

Participants will first work through selected activities from the toolkit in groups, to explore the internet as a physical system, how data and AI function at a systems level, and the environmental and material costs of digital technologies.

This is followed by a facilitated discussion connecting the hands-on experience to UTT’s approach to user centricity. We will explore: 

1. How the toolkit tries to center community knowledge and what the process of making complex, technical information accessible to young people through information design looks like for the user centricity of this toolkit.

2. How the toolkit’s content and design evolved through iteration and feedback gathered across different contexts through pilot workshops. 

3. How working with diverse implementation partners helped localise the toolkit in various contexts, what challenges does this process pose and what are the best practices that emerge out of this.

• Why is it important to make technical knowledge accessible to non- technical audiences and how do we go about it?

• How we can build educational resources that center youth learning to foster interest in sustainable practices and topics. 

• Designing for non-technical audiences requires translating complex systems into accessible formats without oversimplifying them. This workshop will help showcase that process. 

• Community feedback and pilot testing across diverse contexts can meaningfully reshape a resource's design and delivery. It is thus important to adequately test your product with your user.