home

Notes from the morning & afternoon discussion, Thursday August 6, 2009 (Uncorrected draft)

Group 4: Learning Technologies How can learning technologies – tools, spaces, and places – be designed to support learners within and across environments? How can these learning technologies support collaboration across institutional lines of practitioner, researcher, evaluator?

Cross cutting themes 1. Relationship between learning science and ISE. 2. Connections and disconnections between formal and informal; school and out of school environments 3. Holistic views of learning and development across time, place, and setting

There’s a lot of natural overlap between ISE and LS. Stereotype pushes the notion that there are a lot of differences, eg. LS only works in classrooms. The trick is context of application. Look at where the work is manifesting. This is more where the distinctions are happening. Designs are manifesting in certain contexts. See the distinctions where the rubber hits the road. For example, has traditionally designed tools for classroom settings. But now are designing museum exhibits. The conversations lead to similarities. Where the funding is happening and where the deliverable is destined. Working with exhibit designers versus teachers. What are the differences -	Classroom work is always facilitated. Facilitated toward standards. -	Museum have to grab people’s attention. -	Nature of facilitation is different even when you do have it. Different definitions of learning, different expectations. How do these new space, places, and tools as new media emerges. Research on educational TV, but not much on use of virtual spaces. It’s the beauty of it: classrooms you have an element of compulsory-ness to it. Even with a technological intervention, it is different and new – students are thrilled to use it. But in informal environments is a very testable environment because people vote with their feet. How do you measure this. Authority is a big thing that ends up more for grabs

Technologies – paper and pencil, a building. How people are physically embodied or organized in a museum space versus sitting at a desk. This effects technology use – in a classroom it is easy to pass out a piece of paper but you can’t do that easily in a museum. Web 2.0 in a classroom – teacher as guide rather than the last word.

Are there web 2.0 technologies in ISEs that allow participation from the phone. Look at the extremes – we’re here because we already see the overlap. The bulk of the work, technology is used as an information source only – use Some people are doing some LS things in ISEs because it looks like it will attract new audiences. So using cell phones to get just in time knowledge. Information delivery – just as in a classroom you can have just looking up looking up facts in an encyclopedia or just in time knowledge. Same in museum, can have just extra info that can be accessed, or Idea of encouraging people to make their own media to respond. Increase media literacy. Browser based tools for this. At Penn State – the Summer UnCamp. Caltura – web based video editing program. See that more broadly in media – citizen journalism, the public can be distributors of information. Pushing for reflection – getting people to do something once is easy but getting them to do it a second time and do it differently. Can get the same with having a docent or staff member – talking for even 30 seconds with them gets visitors to go back and revisit Spiraling, cycling, etc gaming with an authentic task – Scholly Fisch – the closer you align the educational goal with the storyline, the more likely it is to be remembered. Games as narrative. Narrative Creation of an artifact. – good intersection with classroom –Ontario Science Center – make it, display it, label it. Also critiquing thing s- how to do this.

How do we categorize these technologies – doing, reflecting, iterating, but underpinning that is what is the activities. Task that they are creating. Can create a task, that is intended to create an experience at museum, at home, carry out later too. But the activity in a classroom will be different. Memorization versus critical thinking, creativity. Starting with goals, building activities that support the goal. Technologies should always just be a tool. Sounds like a design process – what is your starting point. Paper on technology and how we learn to use it. Used to produce video as if we were looking at paintings. Cool stuff – has affordances. Functional learning systems – Scribner and Cole – are you in a formal or informal system. All fo these things are organized in one way or another. In Singapore, one of the aspects in any learning system is the syllabus. What’s important in your life: kids answer homeworks and tests. It is pervasive in Singapore. ray McDermott – it takes more than kids and a teacher and a classroom to ruin a rich learning experience. National curriculum, syllabi transform the Systems are pushing on all of us. – If it is not standards and curriculum, then it is funding goals, etc.

Process of designing for and with learning technologies. Designing for different contexts – museum, versus, home, versus, web, versus classroom. Physical interaction in a museum turns into a web based interaction in the home. The technologies allow for those different technologies to be bridged. Extend the learning experience. We’ve skirted around social interaction. Designing for social interaction. Web 2.0 authority. Talked about interactivity. But these is also social interaction. We design systems that isolate people. Collective intelligence. Some people designing technologies are not at all interested in social interaction. Look at technologies used to support objects in museum. For example – may spend more time looking at the technologies used to support looking at an artwork than you do the art work. A lot of Web 2.0 systems help you connect to people you already know. How do we leverage these ideas in ISEs. How do you design for it. Larry Cuban’s book – we apply what we know to new technologies and new settings that are not fully using the affordances of the technologies. Don’t throw out baby with the bathwater. Clever uses of polling that use mobile devices. Quick feedback. How to get kids to understand group think.

Technologies allow us to include the social dimensions of what were once isolated. Reading comments left from previous. Asynchronous collaboration across time and spaces. Technologies allow us to represent information and data in different ways. Huge volumes of scientific data. Shift authorities of who gets to collection, use, interpretation, and distribution of data and objects. More visual thinking. Allows different entry points of approaches to learning – like more visual thinking. Change roles of creation – Ontario Science Center – enable creation, sharing, and reflection of objects and artifacts. Dynamic response – allows a sense of ownership and agency. Helps you form different identities. Girls thinking of themselves as liking and doing science. Online you can try on all sorts of identities. Allow you to try on different identities. Role play scenarios. Physical immersion. Tools of identities – Mine Games in Vancouver. CSI. Lab coat/gloves/glasses in the wet lab on the museum floor. Use technologies to encourage distinct but supportive roles/identities. Provide more fuel for extended learning later. Agency. Scaffold experiences to push further than possible without technologies. Safe environment – remove awkwardness, allegorical, allows open exploration, get to core concepts faster by removing barriers, even temporarily. Real interactions but not face to face conflict. Very valuable to the public. Public are afraid of children getting hurt by taking on different identities. Audience perspectives on technology use. Relationship with technologies – how they view communication varies by age, identity. Flip side of the transfer – making it your won, adapting for own purposes. Agency – put forth their own learning agendas. Museums struggle so much with having human mentors. There are no substitutions for that. It is so expensive. Web 2.0 for the first time gives us the chance to have learners and teachers simultaneously in an environment – or being both. Project based science – brings scientists as tele-mentors. Bring in experts and provide them with the tools they need to become good mentors. Social monitoring. And then there is the negative side of it. Looking at it from a social interaction perspective. How are we balancing the goals that we put into any one project that we’re doing. Evaluation of the Energy gallery of the London Science Museum. Main goal is not toward social interaction. Children walked away with questions, which was good from the museum perspective. Parents were frustrated by this – the exhibit was not effective because the child should have had all of their questions answered. Do we use technologies to make our goals public? Teachers use blackboards to write the goals for the day up. PDAs acting like a docent. Easy to build in – stop and talk to someone. It is all in the phrasing. Allowing for variation in how much guidance people want in learning environments. How much do we use technologies to break people out of their habits or preferences. Even looking at a tour guide – are you looking at the painting or at the guide. How do we encourage exploration. Allow for many different outcomes. What engagement are we striving for? The object, people you know, people you don’t know, the museum staff. What is the point, the goal? The use of these technologies can be forced or stereotypical. If you have a hammer, you’re going to go around hitting nails. Need to know where you’re headed. Fall back on things like information delivery. Design activities around specific goals. Find the technology that fits the goal and activity. Allows on the spot formative assessment and then revision of the facilitation. Language translation – continuum of how far you take support of all sorts of accessibility. Talking about technologies in very different points in the activities.
 * Is there transfer of learning across settings.

Look at an ecological systems approach (interconnected web of people, environments, tools that get wrapped up in learning). The role of technology in: -	access/distribution -	support -	bridging learning across contexts -	feedback/reflection -	extension in a temporal way -	archives/aggregation -	social interaction -	facilitation -	personalizing/ownership/authority

This conversation has identified ways in which technologies contribute to learning. What else do we need to do? 1.	Definitions: Define each of these categories. Apply these to the different environments, professional audiences, and public audiences. 2.	Retrospective: Give research and evaluation examples for each of what do we know in the different fields and compare to existing summaries. Indicate whether there are differences across the field. Give references and sources. 3.	Prospective: Develop an action plan to go with this, including filling in gaps, bridging communities, projecting the future. Give references and sources. 4.	Deliverables: List of possible publications or other dissemination.

Do this iteratively. Go back and revisit what we defined once we do retrospective and prospective.