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!
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?
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“
“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 wholeworld.
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.
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!
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.
Apple’s live events keep evolving, and I would love to be able to use their “live broadcasting” toolkit—essentially turning their website into a media-rich live blog of the event. Here’s a screenshot of what today’s Apple Watch-focused event looked like:
The key features of this mode of presentation are:
Live video of the main presentation—which is being produced somewhere (usually California) for a live audience.
Produced video elements are used during the presentation. Split-screens are sometimes used to juxtapose the speaker and other content (as above).
Pre-made, widget-like cards appear from top to bottom with short summaries (including images and video) of the presentation content. They have simple, built-in social sharing functionality.
When you scroll down to see older cards, the video is shrunk to a thumbnail and continues to play at the top of the page.
These elements combine for a simple, compelling online presentation. One can easily step away and come back, and skim the cards to see what was missed. It would be equally great if the presentation could be replayed from the point of any ‘card’… though I don’t think this is currently the case!
So, if I had this presentation toolkit, would I use it? Given the amount of pre-planning and multimedia in use, it would certainly take a significant up-front investment (e.g., time, money, preparation). However, to deliver a high-impact event to a web audience, it seems like a great place to start.
I especially like the live element—which underscores the event with the sense that, “this would be even more impressive in person, but I’m as close as I can get!”
My involvement in Teacher College’s Learning Theater project makes me appreciate how fast-evolving audio/video technologies (or better: display/capture/collaboration technologies) challenge traditional architecture.
Our project feels like “techitecture”—a combination of technology and architectural design and development. (And I’m curious that, having imagined this fanciful term, I have not found it used before in this way.)
The fit and function of technology elements in our space will go beyond traditional theater. Not only will the audience not be “fixed” (in seats, etc.), but it’s not even clear to us what events will eventually unfold in the space.
Designing the learning theater space seems more akin to designing the holodeck. It will essentially appear as an empty grid until users imagine ways to activate it.
In undertaking this type of project, it’s clear that architects need to be brave, and AV consultants need to be braver still… We are essentially designing a digital space with bulky materials from the past, and just enough matter to support the needs of humans.
Our video on a recent “maker party” at the Brooklyn Public Library has garnered over 116,000 views to date (with most viewers watching the entire video). Nice work by the EdLab StudiosSeen in NY team!
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…
