Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) Center an NSF Science of Learning Center

A collaborative partnership of the CHIMe Lab at Stanford University, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, and the LIFE Center brought together academic and industry leaders with the goal of encouraging a new community that will engage in interdisciplinary knowledge sharing, agenda-setting, and collaborative research on media multitasking and children’s learning and development. The LIFE Center is pleased to release the workshop report from the first research seminar on this vital area at the interface of scientific research, cultural practices and public policy. This first research seminar was held on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at Stanford University.

Download the workshop report in PDF format: Media Multitasking (84)

Other details, papers, and related materials can be found at the Media Multitasking web site: http://multitasking.stanford.edu

Preface from the Report:

New technology sometimes brings change that is so swift and so sweeping, that the impact and implications are hard to grasp. So it is with the rapid expansion of media use by children and adults–at work and at play, alone and in groups, for ever larger portions of their waking hours. Media multitasking–engaging in more than one media activity at a time–has rapidly become a way of life for American youth, according to a 2005 report from the Kaiser Family Foundation (Roberts, Foehr, & Rideout, 2005), and yet little is known about how this behavior affects their learning and development, their ability to attend, to plan, to think, and to relate to other people. The same may be said for adults, many of whom have taken to media multitasking to the point of “crackBerry” obsession. Aside from the recent alarming reports about the dangers of cell phone use while driving1 or the impact of web surfing on worker productivity, little is known about the larger implications of this now ubiquitous
behavior.

To begin to address this gap in knowledge and to frame a coherent research agenda, a multidisciplinary group of scholars in the emerging field of multitasking assembled for a one-day seminar on media multitasking and its impact on children’s learning and development at Stanford University on July 15, 2009. With grants from the National Science Foundation and the Spencer Foundation, the seminar was jointly organized by Principal Investigator Clifford Nass, the CHIME (Communication between Humans and Interactive Media) Lab Director and the Thomas M. Storke Professor at Stanford University; co-Principal Investigator Roy Pea, representing the LIFE (Learning in Informal and Formal Environments) Center and Professor of Education at Stanford University; and co-Principal Investigator Michael Levine, Executive Director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. Participants included recognized scholars from neuroscience, child development, cognitive science, communication, and
education fields, along with business, policy, and advocacy leaders.

This report summarizes the ideas brought to light at the seminar, including an agenda for next steps by participants and for the larger research community. A glossary of terms, list of seminar participants, a background paper, and a list of questions generated at the seminar appear in the Appendices. Brief memos written by seminar participants on media multitasking in advance of the seminar may be downloaded from http://multitasking.stanford.edu/artifacts.html#memos and http://www.joanganzcooneycenter.org/

Tuesday, October 28, 7:00 pm. Philip Bell, associate professor of learning sciences, gave a special lecture for the UW Alumni Association and the UW College of Education entitled “Pathways to Excellence and Equity in Science, Math and Engineering Education”.

People learn about science and math in a wide range of settings; classrooms, homes, online communities. As such, education needs to be understood as taking place across a wide range of associated institutions; schools, families, after school clubs. Dr. Bell examined why these institutions should provide youth with a broad set of life opportunities and choices associated with science and math learning.

Video: Watch Professor Bell’s lecture

November 22, 2008. Philip Bell was the keynote speaker at the COSEE-Ocean Learning Communities and Washington Sea Grant workshop. The workshop, held at the University of Washington, included formal and informal presentations by marine scientists on current research, training on how to collect and contribute data to the ongoing “Spices in Puget Sound” research with your own “spice sampling kit”, and many opportunities to create connections between marine scientists and marine volunteers around communicating science and research.

November 15, 2008. Philip Bell was the keynote speaker at the EEAW conference “Generation Green: Sustainability Takes Root”. A conference which brought together hundreds of education leaders and stakeholders with a single goal: To inspire and empower through education today’s generations to make decisions today that will promote healthy ecologies, healthy economies, healthy communities, and healthy people for generations to come.

Joan Davis (graduate student, UW) traveled to Stanford University in June to meet with Sandra Okita (former graduate student, Stanford) and her advisor, Dan Schwartz, to learn more about their research on self-other monitoring and the impact of the belief of social interaction (or social expectancy) on learning, and to consult with them about research design for her dissertation. As a result of the visit, Joan is planning to conduct a study that integrates her previous research on person knowledge with their research on the belief of social interaction. In addition, Joan is planning to solicit graduate student and post-doc participation a cross-institution (including LIFE interns) seminar in the Spring quarter that focuses on self-other monitoring and perspective taking in collaborative learning environments and in the design learning technologies.

During Joan’s visit to Stanford, she also met with Vanessa Vega (graduate student, Stanford) to learn more about conducting research studies that incorporate physiological measures. A few months before her visit, Julie Carpenter (graduate student, UW) and Joan had conducted a study to measure people’s physiological response to the design of robots. Vanessa analyzed the stimulus video used and suggested modifications for future studies.

The LIFE Center will host the Second Annual inter-Science of Learning Centers (iSLC) Conference on February 5-7, 2009 at the University of Washington. This conference is designed specifically for junior researchers from the six NSF-funded Science of Learning Centers: CELEST, LIFE, PSLC, SILC, TDLC, and VL2. During this 3-day conference, participants will discuss their common interests for understanding and improving how people learn in a variety of settings and will share and learn about useful methods for conducting research to achieve these goals. The theme for this year’s conference is Social Foundations of Learning: Implications from Research on Brain, Behavior, and Experience.

For more information, please visit our website: http://cns.bu.edu/islc/

Please join the UW College of Education and the UW Alumni Association for a special lecture by Philip Bell, associate professor of learning sciences. He will be speaking on “Pathways to Excellence and Equity in Science, Math and Engineering Education.”

People learn about science and math in a wide range of settings: classrooms, homes, online communities. As such, education needs to be understood as taking place across a wide range of associated institutions: schools, families, after school clubs. Dr. Bell will examine why these institutions should provide youth with a broad set of life opportunities and choices associated with science and math learning.

When: Tuesday, Oct. 28, 7-8:30 p.m. lecture; 8:30-9 p.m. reception
Where: UW Tower (formerly Safeco Tower) Auditorium, Forth Floor
Cost: FREE, but advance registration is requested

Get more information and register online...

Space is limited - please register in advance. You may also register by calling the UW Alumni Association at 206-543-0540 or 1-800-AUW-ALUM.

About Philip Bell
Philip Bell, associate professor of learning sciences at the University of Washington College of Education, conducts ethnographies of children’s learning across social settings. He believes learning science and math is a civil rights issue and that broadening participation in these fields requires a systems approach that starts early.

Read more and register on the Education Lecture Series event page.

The LIFE Center (The Learning in Informal and Formal Environments Center) and the Center for Multicultural Education are proud to present video presentations from two important events related to the work to produce the Diversity Consensus Report. Use the link below to browse the video materials.

The LIFE Center is a research collaboration between the University of Washington, Stanford University, and SRI International focused on transforming our understanding of human learning through a coordinated study of implicit, informal, and formal learning. The LIFE Center shares a common purpose with the Center for Multicultural Education to help all students succeed through education. To this end, we are exploring how we can understand and take into account different forms of learning supported in various contexts, activities, and cultures. The panelists listed as presenters are world-class experts on diversity, education, and learning, and the LIFE Center consensus report, “Learning In and Out of School in Diverse Environments: Life-Long, Life-Wide, and Life-Deep”, is a direct result of their work.

Browse video presentations -»

Researchers:

• Dr. Baba Kofi A. Weusijana, LIFE Sciences of Learning Center, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA
• Rohit Kumar and Dr. Carolyn P. Rose, Language Technologies Institute (LTI) & Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center (PSLC), Carnegie Mellon and University of Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA

Saturday, September 6, 2008 4:00 PM

The Second Life Education Community Conference 2008, part of the Official Second Life Community Convention 2008 in Tampa, Florida (US) and in the virtual world of Second Life.

Educational Tools and Products (Purple Strand)

Researchers from the LIFE and PSLC Science of Learning Centers have joined forces to enhance learning in virtual worlds while exploring augmenting the architectures and behaviors of conversational intelligent tutors. Together they have developed a Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE) conversational agent called MultiTalker built on top of the Basilica framework to facilitate rapid development of agents that chat with a student group. MultiTalker was demonstrated in Second Life to conference and in-world participants who chatted with it as if they were a student group learning thermodynamics together.

Read the rest of this entry »

Authors: Timothy Kieran O’Mahony, Nancy Vye, John Bransford, Michael C. Richey, Vivian T. Dang, Kuen Lin, Moe K. Soleiman

Institutions: University of Washington, The Boeing Company

Abstract

The rapid pace of change is creating what some call a never ending “skills gap” between what people know at the moment and what they need to know in order to be successful in their everyday lives and the workplace. This raises a number of unique learning and identity issues that workers and their organizations must solve. For example, experienced workers who are used to being “masters of their trades” must come to see themselves not only as experts who have mastered strong sets of skills and knowledge, but as adaptive experts who are willing to ask questions, experiment with new ideas, and learn from their fellow workers as well as from other sources of information. Organizations must provide support for these kinds of changes in attitude, identities and criteria for successful work. The study reported in this paper discusses attempts to help a major company make some of these kinds of changes. The approach we helped them implement involved efforts to organize teaching, learning and assessments in ways that went beyond their current training and focused on characteristics of adaptive expertise such as the willingness to take risks and successfully collaborate by asking questions of, and helping their peers.