This is Rolf's Page!
What can space really do in the ways of learning?
Lets see, space can physically guide people to certain resources. Hallways can lead to books and technologies. The size of a space can influence the number of people in an interaction. It's difficult to imagine a class taking place in a closet! A space can take advantage of social norms and tendencies - if people like to be facing eachother, looking eachother in the eye, to collaborate and communicate - then rows of stationary seating all facing the same direction are probably not going to promote the intended behavior. Space can also provide focus. I remember my elementary school was right near an airforce base, and the noise of jets made hearing difficult - especially in portables. Sound insulation would have created a space with fewer noise interuptions that inhibit the communication essential to learning.
It's an interesting distinction, to me, that afterschool programs may be classified as informal learning. Also, according to many elements on the table 1 in the Vadeboncoer article, many of my current classroom learning experiences may actually be informal education. I've always thought about informal learning as being strongly associated with free choice...
Comments: I like the comment about taking advantage of social norms. In some asian cultures, many people may not be comfortable makling direct eye contact. So having a seating layout that has two individuals facing eye-to-eye would be a bad idea (one space would be empty in most cases). I think this relates to the importance of understanding the context in any space design.
San Quentin Machine Shop - 5-17
The main question that I have from this discussion is that the ideas of Cognitive Apprenticeship and Legitimate Peripheral Participation seem to be about applying the learning that goes on in apprenticeship interactions to a classroom, or other learning environment. The idea of applying this learning model to a learning space that already IS an apprenticeship environment seems a bit odd to me. I think that the machine shop probably already has cognitive aspects to learning interactions that take place... I'll have to think about this a little more.
Dan Gilbert: This. is. fantastic. Not only extremely creative delivery, but your comments are fascinating. I especially liked your point that you felt comfortbale being loud because nobody else was there! I'm wondering to what degree did this space support or inhibit your creativity? My initial thought was that the emptiness of the place inhibits creativity, but perhaps with fewer - or no- people around you can push a little harder. great great job.
BEST MUSEUM EXPERIENCE - I'm having trouble choosing a 'best' museum experience, but as a starting point, I'd like to talk about my childhood relationship with the Virginia Beach Marine Science Museum. I was a regular there from the ages of about 6 - 12. I knew the layout pretty much by heart, so on return visits I would always head to my favorite exhibits and places: an outdoor marsh boardwalk, a submarine movie theater, a touch the stingray tank, countless aquariums... and a few more. I also enrolled in a summer camp there for several years in a row. The camp involved creating a small aquarium with a partner. We traveled around to local sites collecting specimens before bringing them back in buckets to the museum to add to our fish tanks. This brings me to a favorite experience. On one of these collecting expeditions, my partner and I caught a caught a baby cobia and put it in our bucket. At the end of the week, when we usually would return the contents of our fish tanks to the ocean, a museum employee asked if we would let the museum take our catch for one of their large aquariums. I was invited "backstage" to see this fish, my fish, as a member of one of the aquariums seen by all of the visitors to the museum. This really felt wonderful to be able to make a meaningful contribution to this place. Reflecting back now, I'd like to maybe explore other ways in which all museum visitors can feel that they are contributing to the museum experience - to not be 'visitors' but contributors - a user generated museum.
Deb Kim I can see why you have a love of museums. Some immediate thoughts come to mind from my own discipline of informal learning environments and youth development. What you described in your reflection speaks to many of the principles for good informal learning environments - authentic participation, development and fostering of a sense of ownership and belonging. These are quite familiar accounts of youth from their experiences in many kinds of CBOs. I also appreciate your notion of creating a user contributed space - and in a theoretical way it speaks to Rogoff's notion that individuals and the museums would be mutually constituting. I wonder however, are you saying you wanted to transform for the general public a more sustained relationship with a museum? What you described of your personal experience is unlike the typical museum visitor. I can imagine it for young people, but for adults, it gets a pick more complex. Inviting certainly.
From Vic - Rolf this is a very interesting concept you bring up, it's museum 2.0! The next big thing! In all seriousness, it actually taps into the Deweyian notions of the learning environment reflecting values of society as well as participant/learner generated problems in order to increase sense of ownership and engagement. This also reminds me of reading Paulo Freire, a Brazilian revolutionary, coined the concept (as a criticism) of "Banking education"....that is treating the learner as someone you deposit information into instead of active learning. The concept of user generated exhibits allows learners to frame the exhibit to reflect their own values and develop a sense of ownership and active participation. Great idea!
Rolf I'll definitely have to look into Freire's work. I began my masters project with museum exhibits as ATM machines. Visitors stand back giving one user privacy to interact with the exhibit - that this seems to be the cultural norm. But what if I apply this banking metaphor? The exhibit is still the ATM machine. An individual user approaches, 'withdraws' information, and moves on. This could be a very cool metaphor for what I think museum exhibits should NOT be.
Nicole Rolf, I love hearing you talk about museums! Your experience about returning again and again to favorite exhibits reminds me of my experiences at the New York State Museum, and the Boston Museum of Science. It might have been nice though, to see those exhibits "evolve" a bit more, as time passed and new discoveries were made--but all the while keeping the elements of those exhibits that we find so familiar and even comforting in their permanence. Thinking about the reading, I wonder how much of our love for our favorite exhibits has to do with their "immediate apprehendability" (either pre-existing or due to becoming more familiar with them over time), and their appeal to our particular learning styles. I also find that as I grew older, I interact with familiar exhibits in different ways--like reading the signs instead of just splashing around in the water tables at the Boston Children's Museum! I wonder if there are specific elements that make it easier for repeat visitors to "graduate" to new levels and be able to continue to enjoy and learn from permanent exhibits, even though they've seen them many times before.
CANTOR ART CENTER - I just wanted to reflect on one slightly negative experience that I had right at the beginning of my visit to Cantor. Immediately after entering, I noticed the huge bronze driftwood horse. I had trouble believing that it was, in fact, bronze because it looked so much like driftwood. I had a surprisingly strong desire to touch it and see for myself, but I followed the direction of the 'do not touch' sign. It wasn't until I walked around the back that I noticed a single piece of sculpture inviting me to touch. This piece, however, looked like bronze. The form was driftwood, but the material was clearly metallic, and it did not look the same as the sculpture. A sign explained the production process - apparently the sculpture was coated with a finish that caused the bronze to resemble wood. I guessed that people's contact with the "touchable" piece had worn off the coating, causing the discrepancy. In any case, this was a frustrating first experience. I couldn't believe that the sculpture was really bronze, and nothing about my interaction with the exhibit satisfied this disbelief. What is the point of creating this material illusion if I just have to trust that it's not what it appears to be? If a sculptor creates a totally realistic and soft looking pillow out of marble, but I can only view the piece from a distance, then the sculpture may just as well be a real pillow.
The notion that experts recognize patterns where novices do not reminded me of something that I read a while back about computers playing the board game, Go ( more info here )vs computers playing chess. If remember correctly, the success of artificial intelligences being able to play chess is due to the computer's ability to process many possible moves very quickly, and NOT because computers recognize patterns in the way that humans do. In go, however, many many more possible moves can be made at any time, and thus computers are not able to process all of these possibilities. Accordingly, computers do a very poor job of playing Go against humans - they don't see the patterns that experts see. This is tangential from the reading, but it's interesting to think about computers as experts or novices.
Also, the idea that the procedural knowledge of experts may be more important than factual knowledge seems very relevant to the LDT masters project that I'm starting. I'm hoping to improve children's knowledge of the process of scientific inquiry. The goal of getting children to learn how to "play scientist" rather than learn facts. This goes back to the idea of learning verbs vs nouns mentioned in class.
My first reaction to the Malcom Brown table is that the goal of showing that, 'learning space design is informed by a number of factors' is much more useful than using the table for design practice. Thinking about future design projects that might involve 'encouraging discovery' I see that I may want to design spaces that include technologies with "analysis and presentation applications." I could envision a learning space design resource with more concrete examples.
Deb Kim ''Rolf, I very much enjoyed your reflection on expertise. I think that while expert human have mastered the patterns (ways of thinking), they've also appropriated the practices and morals of the field of which they are experts and this is where they have a leg up over the artificial intelligence of computers. Lee Shulman, who is the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advance of Teaching has studied the experts in various professions in his goal to improving teaching. He found that in other professions there is a pattern of cognitive, practical, and moral pedagogies that apprentice individuals of a profession. Perhaps it is this triad of ways of knowing that distinguish human experts from computer experts. Just a thought.''
What does it mean to learn? I think of gaining factual knowledge. I think of gaining procedural knowledge. I think of memories, gaining experiences. When Rogoff discusses expertise, I think of aquiring skills that allow someone to accomplish a task faster and more thoroughly. I wonder what an expert learner looks like? Is an expert learner someone who can acquire knowledge and processes quickly? or someone who can recognize patterns of knowledge where novice learners don't?