When: 6:30-8pm, Wednesday, January 13, 2016

Where: MAGNET Room 845, 2 Metrotech Center, Brooklyn, NY 11201

Next Generation Learning Environments: Leveraging Space, Technology, and Real-Time Data to Support Distributed, Collective, and Collaborative Learning

While emerging technologies (e.g., tablets, the Internet of Things) are transforming the ways we work, live, and relate to the world around us, traditional classroom settings have failed to follow suit. In fact, the classroom is one of the few environments that has remained largely unchanged, and what has changed generally does not support students in the kinds of complex collaboration, idea sharing, and inquiry that characterize best practices in education.

Even when innovative curricula are used, the various activities are often not seamlessly integrated (e.g., doing physical experiments, writing in worksheets, reading text, using simulations), creating significant barriers to the successful integration of students’ investigation, evidence, and theory building – and generally fail to leverage the potential of the class’ distributed knowledge. These designs also lack connections to the role the physical space itself plays in mediating student learning and unique opportunities for learning in which digital information is layered upon and across the physical space. To this end, there is an increasing need to rethink the design of learning spaces towards smart, dynamic, and responsive environments that support inquiry.

Mike’s talk will encompass two main themes: 1) How combining tangible, embodied, and immersive technologies can be used to develop interactive learning spaces which support radically new ways for participants to collaborate with peers, investigate rich and engaging phenomena, and generate knowledge; and 2) the role that data-mining and analytics-driven software agents can play in adding a layer of “intelligence” to such spaces, affording real-time orchestration of learners’ movement and groupings, distribution of materials and activities, and providing timely and context sensitive insight to learners and teachers. To illustrate this work, Mike will discuss three learning environments that aim to support a complex array of learning scenarios and learner interactions, findings from these studies, and potential future directions for distributed technology-enhanced learning environments.

Speaker bio

Mike Tissenbaum is a postdoctoral researcher at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and Complex Play Lab (University of Wisconsin–Madison), where he uses design-based approaches to develop and study interactive museum exhibits and connected spaces to teach engineering and science. Mike brings a mixed-methods approach to research by combining multimodal qualitative (video/transcript data) and quantitative (telemetry data/server logs) data, and learning analytics approaches to triangulate findings and provide new lenses into how learners learn.

Mike also leads the development of the Connected Spaces framework that connects pedagogically aligned, physically distributed spaces. Connected Spaces is currently being used to connect makerspaces across Madison to support distributed collaborative work, help children engage with peers across sites, and track their individual and collective learning progressions.

Broadly, Mike investigates how to support real-time orchestration of learning activities through the use of telemetry data, data mining, and intelligent software agents. His recent work explores new roles for orchestrational technologies across both formal and informal learning spaces, such as through the design and development of a real-time tablet app that helps museum docents make decisions about how and when to intervene with patrons engaged in an interactive tabletop engineering exhibit.