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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Learning Places

A new living laboratory, dubbed PlaceLab, will help Home of the Future researchers understand how to inspire smart householders as well as to create smart houses. Through pervasive computing that can sense and report information, project creators are inventing the technologies, materials, and design strategies that can help people live long and healthy lives at home, reduce resource consumption, and integrate learning into daily activities. Volunteer families will occupy the PlaceLab apartment in Cambridge, which is operated jointly by MIT and TIAX, a collaborative product and technology development firm.

Project Oxygen, the child of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), aims to make computing effortless in smart environments. Oxygen is inventing and refining embedded and handheld devices such as the Cricket Indoor Location System so voice and gestures can drive the system. Oxygen’s knowledge management tools include Haystack, a platform for creating, organizing, and visualizing personal information, and the Semantic Web, a Web extension that categorizes types of information to enable fast recovery and reuse.

Oxygen also depends on aire or Agent-based Intelligent Reactive Environments. This research group examines how to design pervasive computing systems and applications for people based on Intelligent Environments, which integrate basic perceptual sensing, speech recognition, and distributed agent logic. aire’s array of tools includes Metaglue, which provides communication and building tools for distributed systems, and k:info, a knowledge-based information display engine. A meeting tool, eFacilitator, allows whiteboard notes to be edited and stored digitally.

Embedding Learning in New Spaces
New opportunities for teaching and learning are embedded in MIT’s architectural renewal. In an MITWorld lecture, “Places for Learning: New Functions and New Forms,” William J. Mitchell, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning, said the new buildings aim to support an intense, creative interaction among community members who can learn from each other and colleagues anywhere in the world.

Five guiding principles, Mitchell said, will support better learning: community, intensity, variety, flexibility, and ubiquity. In the renovated Architecture facilities, students can collaborate through pencil sketches or digital graphics to colleagues at the same table or around the world. The TEAL classroom provides gathering spaces for physics students to draw on video and Web resources for group projects. Diverse and flexible spaces such as the Stata Center accommodate different teaching styles and technological evolution. Every campus space, Mitchell contends, is part of the teaching and learning community, from labs to the Z Center.

MIT’s Center for Educational Technology (MITCET) offers a tour of Innovative Spaces for Learning.

go on to Part 3: Learning Technologies

Designing a Home of the Future Pervasive computing can create teachable moments for residents who want to live well and efficiently.

OKI Develops Structures for Learning The Open Knowledge Initiative is creating learning-technology architecture for the higher education community.

openDOOR on Global Learning Learn about MIT’s distance learning and electronic tools in the November 2000 issue.