Everyday Learning
Computational objects and environments to
provoke curiosity, support construction,
and sustain engagement with powerful
ideas and varied perspectives
Carol Strohecker
Media Lab Europe
2004
The Media Labs
Atelier style, interdisciplinary, international, intersectorial
Including 160 corporate and government sponsors
MIT Media Lab
Cambridge, MA, USA
founded 1985
32 faculty and senior research staff
150 post graduate students
100 undergraduates
Media Lab Europe
Dublin, Ireland
founded July 2000
6 principal investigators
2 adjunct investigators
50+ students
actively 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
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
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
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
Amble Time
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
X
•
X
•
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
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 longterm consequences of sustained
exposures, supporting thinking
about acceptable risk
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”
Dimensional Reading
Electronic books supporting
co-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
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
Moving Minds
…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.
Leveraging kinesthetic senses
for developing broadly useful
spatial understandings
- 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
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