In This Edition

Pervasive Learning

Part 1: Expanding Learning

Part 2: Learning Places

Part 3: Learning Technologies

Interviews

Amy Brand PhD '89 Director of Business Development for CrossRef.org

Cecilia d'Oliveira '77, SM '89 Technology Director for MIT OpenCourseWare

Professor Mitchel Resnick MS '88, PhD '92 LEGO Papert Associate Professor of Learning Research

Claudia Urrea PhD candidate in the Media Lab's Future of Learning Group

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Expanding Learning

Nine children, wearing bendable strip sensors and stomping on pressure sensors in a funky robot way, were doing math as they triggered dramatic changes in lights and sound last summer. Their performance in RoBallet, a dance and technology workshop hosted by the Media Lab, flips the learning experience. RoBallet boils down to rich math, said Future of Learning group director David Cavallo, who helped the children choreograph movement on computer screens.

“We want to give kids an experience of the kind of mathematical thinking that lets them use their sense of their bodies’ movement through space and time and map it to get an animated figure to follow them on stage, a robot arm to move, and music to change,” Cavallo said.

Easy-access Web pages are key to expanding learning frontiers worldwide through OpenCourseWare (OCW). When OCW’s revamped Web site appears with 500 courses in late September, it will offer substance, not Flash, so limited computer power will not halt the flow of knowledge. Already global learners can plunge into henna wedding customs in Anthropology of the Middle East or the history of the space enterprise in Engineering System Division’s Space Policy Seminar. Soon, they can follow sequences of courses such as quantum physics.

Inventing programmable LEGO bricks is one way Mitchel Resnick, director of the Okawa Center and the Lifelong Kindergarten group, likes to help people -- particularly children -- learn new things in new ways. “To get these technologies and ideas out to the public, we work closely with a collection of museums that we call the Playful Invention and Exploration (PIE) Network,” Resnick said in an openDOOR interview. The MIT Museum, a PIE leader, offers a Learning Technologies Scrapbook and Invention Nibbles like Wandering Wands and Doodling Devices.

In another global expansion, Resnick partnered with the Boston Museum of Science to create Computer Clubhouses, which have grown into a worldwide network of 50 after school centers where young people from low-income communities work creatively with new technologies. “It's not about playing games, but about making your own games,'' he said.

go on to Part 2: Learning Places