{"id":5296,"date":"2026-08-15T16:33:23","date_gmt":"2026-08-15T15:33:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ark.greensteps.me\/page\/?p=5296"},"modified":"2026-08-15T16:38:17","modified_gmt":"2026-08-15T15:38:17","slug":"a-new-claim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ark.greensteps.me\/page\/cn\/a-new-claim\/","title":{"rendered":"A New Claim"},"content":{"rendered":"

The last few months have been a quest for a new claim: what is the value of this project and which pain point does it resolve? How can we make both pain point and solution better accessible?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We know that students of most age groups spend excessive amounts of time indoors and are alienated from ecosystems and communities. What is not so much discussed, however, is that school information systems contribute significantly to this alienation and deprivation of real world engagement by digitalizing classroom instruction only. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We have set out to change this and the Green Steps ARK have a new claim, which makes this much clearer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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To benchmark what the ARK proposes against what is available, let’s look into two specific examples.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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1. Bildungschancen Wien<\/a> tries since a few years to enrich public schools in Vienna with formats offered by experts and volunteers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A great initiative with serious limitations: schools only have a very limited budget to book these workshops, and to get offers into the closed system, providers need to undergo a high-threshold screening from the agency which has been endorsed by the government to implement the platform. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As a result, many valuable offers don’t get into the platform and few of them which make it are actually booked. The platform mediates too strictly – it is a closed instead of an open learning system. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Best practices created by providers in the Vienna capital region, which could offer an additional value to a schools in other regions, are not accessible. Instead of a cosmo-local network<\/a> of learning opportunities, Bildungschancen has created a bureaucracy-heavy island solution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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2. Christian Raffetseder<\/a> is a charismatic national park ranger and private nature educator. He has created a website, which he linked to a MSN solution, which make his formats bookable. His approach solves a business problem: how to turn my services into a bookable product which I can turn into a steady revenue stream? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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While we respect both his facilitation skills, the content he offers and his entrepreneurial mindset, his approach reflects the larger pain point: it does not take single experts, but a network of teachers, parents, and local experts to make collaborative and purposeful learning happen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We don’t need a number of island solution – not institutional nor individual ones – but the digital infrastructure which connects schools with villages, neighborhoods, districts, cities, and bioregions. We need the digital infrastructure to enable collaborative learning and volunteering, empowering students to participate in real world activities, meet real people and work on real problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Check out the updated ARK claim and let us know what you think:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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“connecting schools to communities through place-based learning and volunteering”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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IT TAKES A VILLAGE <\/strong>TO RAISE A CHILD<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Green Steps ARK provides the digital infrastructure to make this happen: develop a network of learning opportunities and community partners beyond the classroom, and empower students to tackle real problems and contribute to real projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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You might read this and think “sound good, but how does it work?” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Green Steps ARK is a cosmo-local infrastructre with two main formats: quests and best practices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Quests are a structured method to explore school premises, neighborhoods, municipalities and bioregions which help students and teachers alike to get familiar the world outside of the classroom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Best practices are formats which have been designed by teachers, experts, community partners, etc. and they can be offered by one or several providers in form of activities \/ workshops which are bookable by schools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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practical example 1: a town’s recycling center offers a 3hour workshop which includes a tour of the facility and a presentation about local waste volume and treatment. This workshop can be added by the recycling center as a community to the BP library public or private, but it can be only facilitated by them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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practical example 2: a local non profit or individual educator has created a good format for clean ups and publishes it in the public BP library. Several communities can add it to their portfolio and make it bookable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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practical example 3: a local carpenter has created a half day introduction into wood work, which teaches participants about how different types of timber serve different purposes and which kind of tools are required to make specific products. The public BP is offered by the carpenter and can be reused by other experts in this trade. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As a result there is no more knowledge lock-in but we experience the desired knowledge spill-over both locally and globally, which gives everybody a potential stake in the education of the next generation. Instead of isolated schools, we see the emergence of schools which are embedded in a learning and volunteering network, which is punctuated by more or less active clusters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The last few months have been a quest for a new claim: what is the value of this project and which pain point does it resolve? How can we make both pain point and solution better accessible? We know that students of most age groups spend excessive amounts of time indoors and are alienated from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[82],"class_list":["post-5296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-cosmo-local-learning-infrastructure"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ark.greensteps.me\/page\/cn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ark.greensteps.me\/page\/cn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ark.greensteps.me\/page\/cn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ark.greensteps.me\/page\/cn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ark.greensteps.me\/page\/cn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5296"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ark.greensteps.me\/page\/cn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5303,"href":"https:\/\/ark.greensteps.me\/page\/cn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5296\/revisions\/5303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ark.greensteps.me\/page\/cn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ark.greensteps.me\/page\/cn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ark.greensteps.me\/page\/cn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}