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So, let's get into learning a little bit.
And I am focusing on museums because it is a particular interest of mine.
One of the main reasons I love thinking about learning in museums is that,
children and visitors of any age are in charge.
I mean it's their decision.
Am I going to leave?
Am I going to stay at this exhibit?
Does this exhibit look better?
So, there are decisions being made all the time.
There are no grades, there are essentially no academic rules other than
to go in and explore and learn and be social.
So, I really enjoy that challenge as a technologist
myself focused on educational problems.
I want to think about how do we create
this sort of drive to engage with learning content.
And so here's a little model that's derived from several that are out there as
we have this visitor that arrives to the museum surrounded by things to do,
maybe even sometimes confused or puzzled by it.
We might also have screaming children or upset siblings nearby.
These are challenges as well.
I'm not going to talk as much about that challenge,
but I'm certainly not ignoring it.
So, as this museum visitor looks around,
there are different signs maybe that the person has to read.
And so let's suppose that exhibit E here has drawn,
captured the attention of our visitor.
And there's a little smile. Hey this looks kind of fun.
I get to move some pieces around and see what happens.
And so then they make this decision to go ahead and use that exhibit.
And so this is where we hope that,
this is where rubber meets the road,
this is where we hope things happen.
Now that visitor could say, "No,
I don't like this" and move on,
or the visitor could stay there for 20 minutes.
This is called the stay time and informal educators and researchers often
measure that and use it as one of several indicators of engagement.
But what we, as a learning scientist,
what we hope is that those gears start to move.
We hope that there is some thinking going on,
we hope that there is some changes that
lead to some sort of positive future value for that person.
So, designing exhibits is a skill and an art.
It brings in a lot of different people, experts,
people who create engagement and do storytelling,
people who do learning,
people who are on the floor and actually face-to-face with visitors every day.
So, this is not a simple task to design an exhibit,
and so I don't want to undersell it at all here.
Although, I won't talk about it as much,
it's a very important area of research.
We step back a little bit and think about this overall process of a museum exhibit,
it might look something like this.
So after arrival, somebody catches,
they see something they like.
It's a trigger or a hook.
They decide to engage with that exhibit,
curiosity and interest are sustained.
After some period of time they decide to go back to the space and keep moving on.
I want to refer to one model that's been elaborated extensively.
And this is called the Active Prolonged Engagement model developed at
the Exploratorium in the 1990's and early 2000's.
So, APE is a very successful model for creating these exhibits.
And I want to point to two very important features
of their approach that I also subscribe to.
One is, they like to design exhibits that have no detectable end.
So, that means someone could stay
indefinitely long and never feel as if they've finished that exhibit.
And I think that's a very important idea because if someone kind of finishes,
they may reach conclusions that they've kind of
figured everything out or that they understand everything completely.
So, the idea is to both keep time on task unlimited,
but also to convey the idea that science and
most things that you learn are sort of evolving and always in process.
The second thing they look at,
and there are more than just these two, but these are my favorites.
The second is they look for why people choose to leave an exhibit.
So, why would our friend here decide to
go back to the larger space and go look at something else?
And the reasons that they like to see are that,
they're pulled away from this exhibit because of an external cause.
So, a parent has made them leave or a friend has said,
"Hey come over here."
We don't want them leaving because they're frustrated,
because they think they finished,
because of any other internal reason or judgment being made.
So, these are interesting goals and I like to think about them
when I do my own work both formal and informal.
So, let's go back to this visitor now and we're
going to break this into two parts for the rest of the talk.
One is, we're going to begin by looking at that learner.
So, learner-centered education is something you might hear from time to time.
And we're going to think what do we want to create inside that learner?
What is the goal of our orchestration?
So, I'm going to talk through a little bit of that.
The second part that I'll come to in a little while is that outer circle.
What are the things we can do that influence that inner state of the learner?
And then, I'm also going to talk briefly
about how we detect that inner state of the learner,
which is where technology can really matter.
Dr William CopeProfessor
Dr Mary KalantzisDean
