Is Curiosity Fleeting, or Worse?

Posted on by Brian Hughes

From an evolutionary perspective, there is a clear reason why animals would seek out information: it can be vital to their survival and reproduction… Another possibility is that evolutionary pressures have made information intrinsically rewarding. – From HuffPost

For educators with an interest in enhancing the truthiness of society, the present is a good time for reflection on gaps between our shared myths and the truth. I’m particularly worried about the negative effects of a myth close to the heart of educators: the idea that humans are naturally curious.

Curiosity is certainly valuable. The article Curiosity is Fleeting, but Teachable by Bryan Goodwin is a nice overview of the relevance of a discussion about curiosity to educators. He summarizes recent research:

A recent meta-analysis concluded that together, effort and curiosity have as much influence on student success as intelligence does (von Stumm, Hell, & Chamorro-Premuzic, 2011). Other studies have linked curiosity to better job performance (Reio & Wiswell, 2000); greater life satisfaction and meaning (Kashdan & Steger, 2007); and even longer lives (Swan & Carmelli, 1996).

But perhaps more troublingly:

The longer children stay in school, the less curiosity they tend to demonstrate (Englehard & Monsaas, 1988).

Psychological research suggests that while humans start life as seemingly curious, environmental influences can diminish it. I think this suggests that we are minimally curious, which should be thought of as closer to information-seeking rather than knowledge-seeking. Information-seeking behavior seems highly related to or plodding around the globe with a focus on survival and reproduction, and may have become part of our nature through the process of natural selection. More information, more survival. Can the same be said for curiosity?

If there is nothing natural about curiosity, then it is a mistake to think that children (or people of any age) are going to be motivated by it. Students might ask about understanding and knowledge: what’s in it for us?

I think the answer has to be, “better tools.” Curiosity, imagination, and understanding are closely linked in the history of tool-making. Approaching curiosity as a learned behavior is a good step toward designing pedagogy to inspire imagination and motivate the process of understanding.

How We Created Our Immersive Learning Experience

Posted on by Brian Hughes

We designed the Mars Mission experience for participants to experience:

  • play (going to Mars!)
  • surprise (audio and video cues, live action drama, actors)
  • awe (cinematic media and light)
  • curiosity (theatrical reveals)
  • flow (a continuous story with problems to solve)

With this video, we hope to share how our team thinks about our creative process in the work of creating educational experiences. We learned a lot about integrating several disciplines into one project. Kim was a great leader for our team!

Immersion: When Media is Educational

Posted on by Brian Hughes

Sure, video games are immersive, but are they educational? Only to a very small extent. Educators have been pursuing the connections between immersive media like gaming and education for decades, but I want to offer another perspective: learners have to be suspended between being gamers and game-makers. Here’s a brief reflection on how that can happen…

Put Away the Video Games

Games are really only interesting in small doses. So if you’re going to use them for broader educational purpose, keep it short. This same advice applies to many other activities as well: hooks, icebreakers, brainstorms, research, and perhaps even reading. When it comes to ambitious learning goals, how long does it take until we get bored? Are all engaging educational experiences short in duration? (And is this a feature rather than a bug?)

If we contrast active and exciting learning experiences with more conventional lecture-style information delivery, let’s say the best experiences are the short ones. (Even traditional teacher-led experiences collapse after about 50 minutes, though there is evidence that more interaction is perceived as better.) Is formal education—educational experience that spirals and requires significant exposure to achieve significant recall—ever likely to permanently achieve the velocity to escape boredom for most students most of the time? It seems unlikely, but what if the answer was that it could…

Dynamic Interventions

Teaching often begins with a presentation or a group activity—activities that help individuals explore new ideas while confronting factual information from experts or authoritative sources. A part of our jobs as “producers” in the Learning Theater is to bridge events (and our event partners) from the present into a better-designed-built-environment future.

In the past two years at EdLab, we have begun experimenting with what I will call “dynamic interventions.” These are generally small multimedia gestures that connect classroom activities:  a soundtrack, a light cue, an introductory video for an activity, or a background image. The Learning Theater has enabled us to manipulate the built environment in both subtle and dramatic ways during a face-to-face learning experiences. Using light, sound, video, props, and furnishings, we have built many multimedia experiences to enhance what began as more ordinary learning scenarios.

Adding multimedia to an educational experience is not always the right thing. (As in all design, sometimes simple is better.) But increasingly we’re seeing the blending of “simple” and “multimedia” moments as creating the optimal conditions for sustaining learning over the course of an hour, an afternoon, a day, or longer.

Recent events have given us more confidence to steer our partners toward building dynamic interventions into their plans, and I’m excited to see where these efforts lead. But it won’t just be a matter of adding “fun” and “exciting” multimedia moments into lectures that optimizes learning. The learners are going to be active participants in the process of design and execution.

Immersion

I think “immersion” is a helpful word to describe this enhanced educational experience. Often used in language learning to describe a situation where learner can’t help but be confronted with educationally rich experience, it also comes to us with a sense that the learner is sustained in a state of flow. How can that happen?

Only learners can ultimately tell us what they need. Do they need a break? Do they need a boost of energy? Do they need time to reflect and write? Or time to talk together? Involving learners in the ebb and flow of educational experience with dynamic interventions will raise the stakes. Educators can offer learners an environment, but learners will need to activate it.

Collaboration is a key element of dynamic interventions we’ve made so far. (Learning is often more fun together!) With respect to collaborative activities, learners are really asked to be both participants and educators—taking an active role in their colleagues’ learning. Dynamic interventions can help support learners in both their roles by giving their work new contexts as an activity unfolds—and in a highly aesthetic way. Ultimately, I imagine that the suspension of learners between these different orientations can best sustain a flow experience. Time will tell…

Alas, we are just beginning to explore the possibilities of this exciting—and I think somewhat novel, or at least technologically-heightened—nexus of knowledge, creativity, and learning.

What are ways do you think we can further (or best) support the development and sharing of these ideas and our toolset?

Living Versus Imagining

Posted on by Brian Hughes

3pmxEidpWhat if one of the make-or-break achievements in life is learning how to grapple with the following challenge:

Live in the present, but imagine in the future.

What if that is much easier said than done? What does it take to really imagine in the future? How does one really assess the “present”?

What if the desire to align one’s actions/behaviors to an imagined future is really counterproductive? What if I could be undertaking much more productive projects if I committed more fully to a near-term agenda? (Is diversifying one’s actions a matter of hedging against an unknown future?)

And what if, instead of trying to imagine my way out of the present, I let me imagination wander more freely? What if I made grander assumptions about the future? Would that in fact help me choose better projects in the present? (Isn’t this really what I already do—but not really with much self-awareness?)

What’s a better direction to push in? Connect the present with the imagined? Or disentangle them further?

Isn’t it also a bit of a paradox to live without imagining the future? Where does the absurdity kick in? When I try to align my actions to things that haven’t yet taken place but could transpire in 10, 20, 30 or 100 years? And can one align one’s actions to things that seem unlikely to ever transpire? Would this be considered rational behavior?

It’s the economy.

A simple example that inspires this meditation is how financial markets allow investors to place bets on the future, thereby enabling businesses to use capital to make that future more likely to come transpire. Or money itself, really—an invention of human imagination that enables humans to align their actions in innovative and world-changing ways. We are able to use imagination to change the future—literally building the living conditions and constraints of not-yet-even-born humans.

This is both very banal (we determine the future!) and operationally unsettling (the quality of our imagination can determine every aspect of human livelihood!) in this matter. Particularly: how much can any one human really contribute to this reality-bending? And in a deeply pro-capitalist, anti-humanist society, how is the scale and scope of one’s contribution directly tied to their wealth?

We’re doomed?

What if we humans are just not that good at imagining complex things? (Or just not that good of thinking in general?) Or what if the humans that are good at imagining are systematically selected against (to lean on evolutionary terminology) when capital is distributed? Or what if the selection process that would eventually promote “good imaginers” (obviously a loaded notion) is just too slow?

 

Notes on “Augmenting Education”

Posted on by Brian Hughes

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VR gear at a Facebook event in 2015

I have a recurring vision of a dilapidated 19th century classroom full of children with VR goggles strapped to their heads. It’s worth considering why this could be both a nightmarish vision and a reasonable, near-term goal for anyone who cares about public education…

Here is a brief sketch of an outline I can imagine using to undertake the task:

Immersive-to-augmented Reality Versus Virtual Reality: What path is best for education?

  • Examples
  • Define “Immersive-to-augmented”

Ways to analyze:

  • What past is most open to collaboration (and at different “levels”)?
  • What is most compelling? (Does our hunch about virtual prove lacking?)

After initial case for “augmented” is made:

  • What makes AR better for education (i.e, collaborative)?
  • What makes AR more compelling? (i.e., examples of extreme fun)
  • When is VR useful? (i.e., cheaper? more accessible?)

Visions for Education

  • Enlarged and Narrowed

I might call the resulting essay:

“Augmenting Education: Comparing Two Paths for Immersive Educational Experience“

Making of a Learning Theater

Posted on by Brian Hughes

"Library Orientation" in the Learning Theater, Summer 2016 by Yuntong Man
“Library Orientation” in the Learning Theater, Summer 2016 by Yuntong Man

I just had the great fortune of spending two days with Leakey Foundation members exploring the meaning of evolution (and human origins) in relation to the theme of “human survival.” It was an amazing experience led by seven thoughtful and well-spoken scientists speaking about diverse topics such as physiology, virology, climatology, behavioral psychology, and more.

It not only led me to reflect on how to describe my work, but (perhaps predictably) how to describe it at a cocktail party in under two minutes. And for me, that’s the challenge of describing EdLab.

What are folks at EdLab doing?

At EdLab, our work touches on many of the ideas that were explored during two days of discussions on the survival of humans—namely, how can education help us solve our most difficult problems as a species?

We do a lot of experimental software and multimedia projects at EdLab, and we also run the Gottesman Libraries—a local, service-oriented side of our work that keeps us enmeshed in the immediate, day-to-day work of the Teachers College community of 5,000 teachers and researchers. And for the past two years, some of us have been involved in making a “learning theater”—an extension of both the “experimental” and “practical” sides of our work.

Creating a “Learning Theater”

I’ve been deeply involved in this project of conceptualizing, developing, building, and programming the Smith Learning Theater. Indeed, just recently I’ve spent many hours optimizing the workflow of the soon-to-be-completed AV system; multimedia, however, is only one aspect of this expansive project. In light of my recent cocktail party experience, I’ll risk summarizing the purpose and mission of this experimental space as follows:

The Learning Theater is designed as a multi-use space for active learning supported by innovative multimedia technology, a unique software platform, and the most knowledgeable teachers in the world.

(Oh, did I forget to mention that it’s a unique and complex architectural endeavor at one of the world’s leading educational institutions, and possibly the most advanced space of its kind in the world!? That’s right: pretty cool stuff.)

We’ll be unpacking this mission over the next decade, and trying to live up to the potential this space affords us and our collaborators. But if someone asks me right now what that means to make this space work, these are some of the ideas that come to mind:

  • Exploring the pedagogical and technological potential of such a space with everyone who uses it.
  • Working smarter, harder, and finding the right colleagues who are willing to undertake this inherently interdisciplinary work.
  • Taking risks, and resisting institutional pressures that diminish creativity.
  • Making an effort to share Learning Theater experiences with the whole world.
  • Thoughtfully supporting even modest efforts to use the Learning Theater.
  • …and rigorously demonstrating how learning happens in an active, comfortable space!

The Learning Theater should change the world. It should change education and, importantly, perceptions of education; it should deepen respect for teaching as a noble, complex, and valuable vocation.

This week I witnessed a handful of caring, thoughtful, visionary, and eminent scientists agreeing that, above all, the well-being of the human race essentially rests on the ability of teachers (of all kinds) to inspire billions of people to be more imaginative, curious, and empathetic.

It’s a complex problem a whole bunch of people need to work together to solve.

Join us!

I wanted to be Todd Howard

Posted on by Brian Hughes

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When I was 15 years old, I definitely wanted to be Todd Howard:

On November 10, Howard’s latest project arrived like a thunderclap: Fallout 4 is the biggest game his team has ever made, a Skyrim-sized post-nuclear world brimming with more than 100,000 lines of spoken dialogue, coupled to a mammoth crafting system fed by all those wasteland odds and ends players can pluck from dilapidated desks and derelict trashcans.

In other words, he creates vast, virtual worlds for video games. These days I’m not as interested in the virtual worlds, but Howard’s work itself—the work it takes to create those worlds—is very interesting!

What’s Not to Like about Innovation?

Posted on by Brian Hughes

Like creativity, innovation is a diffuse concept that requires a significant amount of rehabilitation to be used in an effective, precise way. The two concepts are indeed often intertwined. But I would want to argue that “innovation” is analogous to corporate personhood—and deserving of the same liberal ire.

OK, let me unpack this a bit. First, it appears as if organizations more often (are said to) seek innovation whereas individuals seek creativity. To wit: “innovation will lead us to the next big product.” Creativity seems to align better with masterpieces and experiments.

Innovation is “new;” creativity is “original.”

Both these statements drive me a bit bonkers (insofar as they are often unsubstantiated) , but can of course be meaningful and profound. But are these perhaps two sides of the same coin? Or should they be understood entirely differently?

Shouldn’t they be viewed analogously to persons and corporate persons —one aspirational, and the other antagonistic to the aspiration?

Yet at every turn both concepts will resist definition. Is innovation about technological change? Well, not exactly. Is creativity about imagination? Well, again, not exactly. An essay would have to focus on a broad-yet-common conceptualization of each term, and locate historical uses that exemplified their similarities and contrasts.

Could pitting them against each other be instrumental in expressing value for humanity over technology-fo-technologies-sake? Maybe!

It seems worth trying.