Immersion: When Media is Educational

February 16, 2019 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?

The Most Flexible Immersive Learning Space

October 9, 2017 by Brian Hughes

A bold title? Not when you’re talking about the Smith Learning Theater. In Gary Natriello’s words, it “underscores our commitment to producing unconventionally collaborative, custom-designed, authentic learning experiences that are playful, valuable, and inspiring.”

I’m grateful to have played a role in bringing this space into existence for the past 3 years. I’m excited to see how educators and educational researchers use it.

It’s truly an innovative space, combining five distinct data networks (supported by over twenty miles of fiberoptic and copper cabling) with a flexible ceiling grid, geo-spatial tracking system, and video broadcast-ready AV system packed into a 6,600 sq. ft. event space.

You might think it was designed from the ground up for learning in the Experience Age.

Check out the Library’s Rhizr for event highlights and more information.

Documentaries in the curriculum

May 15, 2015 by Brian Hughes

Filming_Documentary_about_Sinenjongo_High_School_in_Joe_Slovo_Park,_Cape_Town,_South_Africa_-_02 — Someone documenting someone!

Jeff Frank‘s article on expanding the educational significance of documentary film (Frank 2013, detail below) is a thoughtful reflection on how film and education can intersect.

Frank is a philosopher interested in better understanding education generally, with a specific interest in literature and other narrative texts (I love that he teaches a class entitled, “What Does it Mean to be Educated?”).

In this essay he outlines how educators can be “responsive to genre” when teaching from/with documentary films. By contrasting how a documentary approach is different from a “news” approach, Frank surfaces issues of how bias is constructed and experienced through media. He argues that a documentary film necessarily surfaces the issue of how a subject is represented, and what the inherent biases, shortcomings, or values of that approach may be to the viewer. News, for example, often sidesteps this “deeper” discussion of the many problems of representation (perhaps, not wrongly, news relies more heavily on the “brand identity of the publisher?).

He then returns to his claim that documentary film is a more meaningful educational tool than a source of mere content, connecting it’s method (of surfacing issues of representation) to the project of building a democratic public. Drawing on Stanley Cavell’s voice and work, Frank shows how engaging a documentary might lead someone through a “transformational” educational experience—the kind of experience where the world changes you. Very cool.

Full citation: Frank, J. (2013). The Claims of Documentary: Expanding the educational significance of documentary film. Educational Philosophy & Theory, 45(10), 1018-1027.

Gymnasiums as “Learning Theaters”?

December 12, 2014 by Brian Hughes

If you had a high school gymnasium, how would you turn it into a technology-friendly space for teaching, learning, and research?

As part of the Gottesman Libraries team, I’m currently involved in developing the concept of a “learning theater” — both programmatically and architecturally. Pulling this concept out of primordial soup of imagination (if such a space already exists as we imagine it, we do not know of it), our team embarked on a very broad inquiry:

What could a learning theater be?
What could it be within a library (in our case, it is)?
What is it within the context of Teachers College (with its legacy of innovation)?

We’ve already come a long way. Last winter, library staff hosted a series of design events with the TC community (summary videos can be viewed on Vialogues). This fall we’ve been working with a design team from Shepley Bulfinch to develop the concept and arrive at a schematic design. Our goal:

Renovate the 10,000 sq. ft. fourth floor of Russell Hall as a space for ambitious learning and research activities.

One aspect of our design progress that I’m very excited about is the ability for other educational institutions to use what we’re learning (and inevitably going to learn later on, after we move into our facility).

Don’t all schools need innovative teaching and learning spaces? These will be spaces that must accommodate richer and richer densities of learning tools – physical, digital, and any/every combination thereof. Being able to conduct research about teaching and learning in these spaces, therefore, seems to be increasingly important as well.

Retrofitting libraries and high school gymnasiums as new learning spaces could be only the beginning…