This article examines how people learn by actively observing and "listening-in" on ongoing activities as they participate in shared endeavors. Keen observation and listening-in are especially valued and used in some cultural communities in which children are part of mature community activities. This intent participation also occurs in some settings (such as early language learning in the family) in communities that routinely segregate children from the full range of adult activities. However, in the past century some industrial societies have relied on a specialized form of instruction that
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Barbara RogoffRuth ParadiseRebeca Mejia ArauzMarciela Correra-ChavezCathy Angelillo
EDC’s Center for Children and Technology (CCT), a nonprofit research and development organization (cct.edc.org), conducted the formative evaluation of the BAS project for the last three years. Iridescent has assisted CCT researchers in the successful implementation of the evaluation (e.g., organizing site visits and meetings with partners, administering surveys, collecting consent forms). As discussed in more details below, Iridescent has always taken seriously the evaluation findings and recommendations, and has acted upon them to make program improvements. This research partnership has led
This article reviews how the relationship between computer games and learning has been conceptualized in policy and academic literature, and proposes a methodology for exploring learning with games that focuses on how games are enacted in social interactions. Drawing on Sutton-Smith's description of the rhetorics of play, it argues that the educational value of games has often been defined in terms of remedying the failures of the education system. This, however, ascribes to games a specific ontology in a popular culture that is defined in terms of its opposition to school culture. By
Both in common parlance and within the academy, the word “learning” has broad and varied meanings. On the street, we apply the same term to a child who, as a result of bitter experience, will no longer tease an older, tougher peer, and to those who achieve the highest Latinate degrees after many years of study at the University. In the field of psychology, “learning” was the major topic in America for fifty years, before it was replaced and almost consigned to oblivion, courtesy of the “cognitive revolution” of the 1960s (Gardner 1985). Now, with study becoming a lifelong enterprise, and with
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Margaret WelgelCarrie JamesHoward Gardner
In this article we report assessment results from two studies in an ongoing design experiment intended to provide a single school system with a sequence of secondary school level (ages 14–18) computer technology courses. In our first study, we share data on students’ learning as a function of the required introductory course and their pre-course history of technological experience. In order to go beyond traditional assessments of learning we assessed two aspects of students’ “ learning ecologies”: their use of a variety of learning resources and the extent to which they share their knowledge
Designers have been moving increasingly closer to the future users of what they design and the next new thing in the changing landscape of design research has become co-designing with your users. But co-designing is actually not new at all, having taken distinctly different paths in the US and in Europe. The evolution in design research from a user-centered approach to co-designing is changing the roles of the designer, the researcher and the person formerly known as the “user”. The implications of this shift for the education of designers and researchers are enormous. The evolution in design
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Elizabeth SandersPieter Jan Stappers
What meaning visitors make from their interactions with science center exhibits— and how they do so — is an issue of enduring interest in the field of learning in informal contexts. In order to explore what resources schoolchildren bring to bear in making meaning, this study used video clips taken during school trips to prompt reflection in stimulated recall interviews. The results indicated that students utilized their existing science understandings to interpret and explain their interactions with exhibits. Such findings provide evidence for the educative value of the experience as well as
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Jennifer DeWitt
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
The Delaware Valley Innovation Network (DVIN); a coalition of government, industry and educational institutions, received a three-year $5.1 million federal grant to create a data tool that incorporates economic, research and development, investment and real-time job information to provide a current and accurate picture of the region's life science economy and its assets. The project goal was to expand the talent pool for life sciences companies in southeastern Pennsylvania, South Jersey and northern Delaware. DVIN generated research projects, inventory assessments, cross-disciplinary
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Delaware Valley Innovation NetworkJohn Hall
Over the next 10 years, we anticipate that personal, portable, wirelessly-networked technologies will become ubiquitous in the lives of learners — indeed, in many countries, this is already a reality. We see that ready-to-hand access creates the potential for a new phase in the evolution of technology-enhanced learning (TEL), characterized by "seamless learning spaces" and marked by continuity of the learning experience across different scenarios (or environments), and emerging from the availability of one device or more per student ("one-to-one"). One-to-one TEL has the potential to "cross
Although the generic subject of botanical garden history is increasingly well documented, botanical gardens lack a reflective historical commentary on the educational work of their institutions. Apart from individual garden monographs, and the work of Stafleu, Prest, and Spary, few authors have examined the socio-educational history of botanical gardens. Exceptions to this are Gilberthorpe's doctoral thesis, which critiqued changes in British botanical gardens in the 1980s, and Kleinman's doctoral study, The Museum in the Garden, which considered research, display, and education at The
This article is intended to spark a discussion between two research communities—scholars who study learning and scholars who study educational organizations. A secondary purpose is to encourage researchers to look beyond schools to examine learning in other types of educational organizations. The authors outline a framework to guide research on the relationship between learning and the social contexts afforded by formal organizations. The framework combines elements of cultural historical activity theory, a sociocultural theory of learning, and institutional theory, which is a constructivist
The present paper thoroughly examines how one can effectively bridge in-school and out-of-school learning. The first part discusses the difficulty in defining out-of-school learning. It proposes to distinguish three types of learning: formal, informal, and non-formal. The second part raises the question of whether out-of-school learning should be dealt with in the in-school system, in view of the fact that we experience informal learning anyway as well as considering the disadvantages and difficulties teachers are confronted with when planning and carrying out scientific fieldtrips. The voices