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 • stro@media.mit.edu •

www.medialabeurope.org