Afternoon Breakout Session Notes
Formal and Informal Learning
●
What will it take to create learning heroes?
○ Group one
■ Youth are at formal spaces all day, find ways to engage with spaces that
they are already involved in
■ Support collaboration, assessing, and development between between
informal and formal to create a more effective system
○ Group two
■ Build resilience and grit to promote autonomous learning
■ Mobile inquiry labs to go to already existing institutions and promote
exploration and
■ Localizing learning in communities
○ Group three
■ Learning happens in different places and different times
■ Getting people healthy so they can learn
■ Means for moving toward a solution - The Learn Bot
■ Innovation, humanist perspective, accountability
Other Notes:
Learning heroes:
- children because of passion, experiental, and full imersion; learning experience iterative,
nonlinear; curosity and how kids explore
- parents, spouses, teachers, other leaders in the field
learning hero traits: uninhibited, passionate, experiental, iterative, nonlinear, curosity, fearless,
ambitious, continuous, reciprocal, proactive, aware, open-ended, collaborative, child-like,
inspired, unexpected, explanation, thinking deeply/questioning, interest-driven, motivated,
inerdisciplainary, listening, communitty,
What is it going to take to create learning heroes? A place for learning heroes
- what's resource need, what's going to create learning heroes
Cen:
- More children's librarians
Beth:
- Need space, people, creative atmosphere
Shawn Fullerton
- people engaging with youth about the things they care about
- take the things already there and transform them
Beth
- formal setttings must be transformed by informal settings
- create a new platform of different profiles - not full collaborating of schools/libraries
Other:
Nurture innovative practices (eg new media)
Shawn
- build space where all the youth are coming there
Beth
- school open up to other posiblities outside of school - then have experts come in
Cen
- come up with new platform/space but also use existing assets
- spaces that are good, but how can make better
O
- "learner at center of learning ecosystem"
- learners learning everywhere not just classroom
- existing structures need to adapt and change - not just leverage them
obstacles to this:
- competing for funding
- structures
- different professions/professional cculture, vocab
- breaking down communication barriers
- bandwidth
- infrastructure, power structure
- mandates for learning - opposite of connected learning
- conformitty of epectations
- research not making itts way to practitioners and visa versa
O: adult mentors may not have their own learning heroes, so how can they appropriately mentor
kids or encourage them to find learning heroes - no
Why is it that kids below the age of 5 and their learnning is idealized, not older kids or adults
- more messy, especially if interest is controversal
Managing own creative impulse important to being a learning hero
why isn't learing structured as "i don't know, let's figure it out together"
summary of group
- informal leaarning spaces, new media; library after school programs
- youth at formal settings already so engage with spaces already so how can turn this into
informal learning
- supporting collaboration and conintuous improvement on formal settings and informal settngs
and communicatiion with researchers and practitioners
- intteratively collaboraaating, assessiing, moving together in this way
- research, practice, policy - intergenerational learning
Summary of annother group
- build autonomous learners - outcome looking to build
- looking for intrisic motivation - cultivate this quality
- resources already within city - placeless space: move kids around on a bus to various places
in the city in which to learn from existing resources; mobile labs
Summary of third group
- brainstormed what was important: research, policy, integration
- different models of learning; time and space various--different learning at different times
- people can't learn if don't have basic tools and are healthy (eg healthy families)
- all leads to LearnBot --> senario: learn from family's situaation and make suggestions - will be
individualized for families - personalized, research-based, connected, adaptable
- collaboration
- inttergenerational learning
-reslience
-intrisic motivation nand motivating leaarners
- localized learning and outside established learning instutitions
- innovations - wht people need in order to learn (families, lives, etc in learning enviornmentt)
Allison - none of this is surprising--still want the same things as 20 yrs ago even though we have
new tools. Why doesn't it exist? How to take those ideas and bring it into a reality.
- have the resource, have possiblities, just havne't brought it together
problems - collaboratiions are hard, policy
"answer isn't technology - it's the people" - Beth
Rebecca Reynolds - need to spend more time as a soeicty thinking aout what people need to be
learning. then the technology is there
- see what people need to be learning to address challenges that we have