Produsage Is Not a Theory. It Is How I Actually Build Things

 

Produsage Is Not a Theory. It Is How I Actually Build Things.

Posted by Damilare Ajayi 

Before this course introduced me to the term produsage, I was already doing it. I just called it building in public. Now I know!

When I launched EduPrompt, the free AI lesson plan generator for African educators, the first version was not the product. It was the invitation. I put it out there knowing it was incomplete, knowing that the teachers in Lagos and Nairobi and Kigali who started using it would tell me, through their behavior and their feedback, what it actually needed to become. The tool I have now is not the tool I designed. It is the tool the community designed through use. That is produsage. Not as a pedagogical theory but as a product development philosophy.

AI Sparks Hub, the performance support space I built for this course's produsage assignment, made that dynamic explicit in a way that EduPrompt did not. With EduPrompt, the produsage happens at the tool level: users generate lesson plans, the prompts surface patterns, the patterns inform updates. With AI Sparks Hub, the produsage happens at the knowledge level: faculty try an activity, post a reflection on Padlet, and that reflection becomes the resource the next faculty member learns from. The tool does not just improve through use. It teaches through use. Every post is a form of instruction that no course designer authored.

What this semester helped me see is that produsage is not a feature you add to a tool. It is a design philosophy that requires you to give up a particular kind of control, the control that says the designer knows best what the resource should contain. In exchange, you get something no individual designer can produce: a resource that reflects the accumulated intelligence of the people who actually use it. For EdTech tools serving diverse communities, whether faculty at FSU or teachers across twenty African countries, that trade is always worth making.

The hardest part of designing for produsage is the cold start. A Padlet board with no posts is an empty room. EduPrompt with no users is just a text box. The first contribution is the most important one, not because of its content but because it signals that contribution is possible and welcome. Every community has that first person who posts into the silence. This semester, for AI Sparks Hub, that person was me playing the role of Maria Chen. For EduPrompt, it was the first teacher in Nigeria who trusted a tool with no testimonials. I owe that teacher more than she knows.

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