Everyday Learning

1. Everyday Learning Computational objects and environments to provoke curiosity, support construction, and sustain engagement with powerful ideas and varied perspectives Carol StroheckerMedia Lab Europe 2004

2. The Media Labs Atelier style, interdisciplinary, international, intersectorial Including 160 corporate and government sponsors Media Lab Europe Dublin, Ireland founded July 2000 6 principal investigators 2 adjunct investigators 50+ students actively growing MIT Media Lab Cambridge, MA, USA founded 1985 32 faculty and senior research staff 150 post graduate students 100 undergraduates

3. MLE Everyday Learning Everyday Learning concerns how people learn through life -- meaning through the lifetime and through day-to-day living, in everyday situations.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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

11. Everyday Learning Computational objects and environments to provoke curiosity, support construction, and sustain engagement with powerful ideas and varied perspectives

12. Dino Stable Bony creatures that balance as they move 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

13. Birdcase A flight of learning about songs and sensors 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

14. Biosphera A microworld for learning about ecosystems – every action has a consequence 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

15. Amble Time X X • • A map with a sense of time Can I stroll to the park for 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

16. Nature Trailer Stories for environmental exploring and managing time 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 A collaboration with the Weather Stories project, MLE Story Networks group

17. Smoke Rings Monitoring and modeling smoke exposure for understanding risk 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

18. TexTales Developing archives, opinions and literacies with public photos and SMS texts 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”

19. Dimensional Reading Electronic books supportingco-constructed meanings 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

20. Polymorphic Letters Reflecting “voice” through expressive movements and writing 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

21. Moving Minds Leveraging 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 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 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

22. Everyday Learning Tools and environments for learning that is creative,curiosity-based, self-motivated, personalised Tools reveal somethingabout themselves, their domain of operation, or their users; everydaysettings become informal learning environments that are welcoming, engaging,and productive for members of different cultures and generations

23. 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…

24. 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