Everyday Learning Computational objects and environments to provoke curiosity, support construction,...
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Transcript of Everyday Learning Computational objects and environments to provoke curiosity, support construction,...
Everyday Learning
Computational objects and
environments to provoke curiosity,
support construction, and sustain
engagement with powerful ideas
and varied perspectivesCarol Strohecker
Media Lab Europe
2004
Atelier style, interdisciplinary, international, intersectorialIncluding 160 corporate and government sponsors
The Media Labs
MIT Media LabCambridge, MA, USA
founded 198532 faculty and senior research staff
150 post graduate students100 undergraduates
Media Lab EuropeDublin, Irelandfounded July 2000
6 principal investigators2 adjunct investigators
50+ studentsactively growing
MLE Everyday Learning
Everyday Learning concerns how people learn through life --
meaning through the lifetime and through day-to-day living, in everyday situations.
Everyday Learning
We call these “informal” learning situations.
They differ from “formal” learning situations as you’d find in schools and professional training programs where, typically, someone external to the learner says not only what the learner should learn, but how to go about learning it.
Everyday Learning
Instead, we are interested in situations where learning is based on the learner’s curiosity,
where learners come because they want to rather than because someone tells them they should, and
where learners have the freedom to pursue ideas in their own ways.
Everyday Learning
Therefore we are interested in settings like homes, museums, zoos, clubhouses, community centres, airports, shopping areas, and workplaces,
and how we can help to shape these settings as informal learning environments that are welcoming, engaging, and productive.
Everyday Learning
An important aspect of such environments is that they provide material and social supports for people to pursue creative activities centred around some core idea.
For us this core is often a basic idea in math or science, because we are interested in how more people can develop thinking that will enable them to participate fully in our technological society.
Everyday Learning
In order to design learning environments that
will be welcoming and meaningful for many people,
we need to consider the broad diversity
that characterises human thinking and knowing.
Everyday Learning
This leads us to the design principle of representing ideas in multiple ways and at multiple scales.
It also leads us to arrange unusual learning partnerships, such as between members of different cultures and different generations.
Everyday Learning
We invent tools and environments with and in which people can experiment with ideas, create things using computational materials, and make their creations public.
Project focuses: varying approaches to building supports for thinking about ecology, probability, time and expressive movement
Everyday Learning
Computational objects and
environments
to provoke curiosity,
support construction,
and sustain engagement with
powerful ideas and varied
perspectives
A microworld-style construction kit for exploring the role of center of mass in
balancing
Unearth RF-tagged skeletal parts for virtual assembly as whimsical creatures that can
walk and run
Number of legs, location and mass of centre, and selected
speed determine whether the creature can balance as
it moves – or crash into a heap of bones
Gait patterns from literature on biomechanics and
locomotion
Dino StableBony creatures that balance as
they move
You hear recordings of birds from speakers along
the walls
Sensors detect your rate of movement, proximity
to “birds,” and how much noise you make
Inputs form a degree of disturbance that triggers
sounds emulating the birds’ natural reactions to
squawk or fly away
BirdcaseA flight of learning about
songs and sensors
Sensors and actuators in a miniature greenhouse
connected to a simulation environment
Multiple representations of invisible quantities and abstract relationships
Ideas of acceptable risk and projections in time
BiospheraA microworld for learning about ecosystems – every action has a consequence
Can I stroll to the parkfor lunch, or would it
take me all day?
Uses GPS and your average walking speed to
create bubble indicating everywhere you could
walk in an hour
Slowly shrinks and morphs as your position changes and time ticks
by, eventually highlighting the shortest path to your destination
Amble TimeA map with a sense of
time
X•
X•
Aids hikers in deciding which way to go, where to rest,
and when to turn back before darkness falls
Uses weather sensors and metadata to filter content
and describe locations through story
Hikers ‘peer’ down trails, seeing glimpses of what to expect through snippets of
media
Saves a trace of their walk for later reflections with full
videos
Nature TrailerStories for environmental
exploring and managing time
A collaboration with the Weather Stories project, MLE Story Networks group
Mobile sensing device detects chemical
components of environmental tobacco
smoke
Logs readings on a 12-hour clock to visualise conditions of locations and patterns in
daily routine
Coupled simulator projects long-term consequences of
sustained exposures, supporting thinking about
acceptable risk
Smoke RingsMonitoring and modeling
smoke exposure for understanding risk
Large-scale installations for developing and expressing opinions at individual and
collective scales
Public debate of low-income urban housing renovations,
tensions among factions in a rural community, legislation restricting smoking in public
places
Emergent archives of collective photo essays and
public opinion
Text-image combinations as deliberative “short forms”
TexTalesDeveloping archives, opinions and
literacies with public photos and SMS texts
Pages emit sounds to accompany pictures and
text
Additional sounds play according to properties of
the physical environment:
As the reader’s voice and ambient light conditions
change, the music and effects adjust to help
connect the readers’ world to that of the story
characters’
Adults and kids read together
Dimensional ReadingElectronic books
supportingco-constructed meanings
Handwriting attributes mapped to comparable
attributes of images and sounds
Rich meanings emerge through modal
combinations
Structured “short forms”
Expression through movement
New kinds of constructive
literacies via dynamic media
Polymorphic LettersReflecting “voice” through expressive movements and
writing
Movements from:
Fine-motor to gross-motor
Involving fingers and hands to whole-body
movements
Simpler to more complex, requiring shorter or
longer times to learn or perform
Moving MindsLeveraging kinesthetic senses for developing broadly useful spatial
understandings
…from the first days of life a child is engaged in…extracting mathematical knowledge from the intersection of body with environment. …whether we intend it or not, the teaching of mathematics, as it is traditionally done in our schools, is a process by which we ask the child to forget the natural experience of mathematics in order to learn a new set of rules.
- Seymour Papert 1980.Mindstorms, 206-07
What Louis Armstrong was to jazz, Shannon is to the electronic, digital information age … For some time his…interest has been juggling, continuing a life long fascination with balance and uncontrolled stability. Shannon’s theorem…defines relations that must exist among the times that the hands are empty or full and the time each ball spends in the air.
- Sloane & Wyner 1993, Beek & Lewbel 1995
Everyday Learning
Tools and environments for learning that is creative, curiosity-based, self-motivated,
personalised
Tools reveal something about themselves, their domain of operation, or their users; everyday
settings become informal learning environments that are welcoming, engaging,
and productive for members of different cultures and generations
Themes
Computational tools and environments that support and reveal conceptual development – “objects to think with”
“Collect and reflect”
Individual and collective creativity
Multiple learning styles, intercultural and intergenerational partnerships
Environmental awareness and actions
"Body knowledge" joining dance, architecture, maths, physics…
Everyday Learning
Elucidating and supporting diverse learning processes as individuals and communities
increasingly take charge of:
- their own health care and wellbeing, and that of the environments in which they live;
- their own accessing and generating of information, and forming and expressing of opinions;
- their own development at personal and collective scales
Thank you • [email protected] •
www.medialabeurope.org