Connected Learning Explained

Mimi Ito, director of the Connected Learning Lab at UC Irvine, shares examples of connected learning from her own life and …

Connected Learning Explained/a>

[Music] many years ago when my son was seven or eight years old so about third grade still a little guy he went off on a hike at a canyon not too far from our house in Southern California with his dad and when he got there they found a pond that was full of tadpoles so of course he dumps his water out of his thermos scoops up the tadpoles and brings them home and of course when they come home with the service full of squiggly creatures I am NOT terribly delighted but dad says he’s gonna go right away to the aquarium shop and figure out what they need to do to raise these tadpoles into frogs so they take off they’re gone for a long time and then when they finally come back they have a huge aquarium with two different kinds of sand rocks so special – screen everything these critters could possibly need and my son he’s just beaming and I think he’s just so happy that he scored all this stuff but it turns out what we was so delighted about was somebody he met at the aquarium shop the aquarium shop guy so it turns out the aquarium shop guy when he was my son’s age went on the same walk in the same Canyon found the tadpoles scooped them up brought them home and he did research and figure it out how to raise tadpoles into frogs and he described this moment in his youth to my son and why it was really important to him and how it was part of his you know trajectory to picking his chosen vocation in life and what I found was so interesting is that for several years after this encounter when my son was asked that ubiquitous question what do you want to be when you grow up he would scratch little head and say I think I might want to design video games or maybe I’ll make robots or I know I could be an aquarium shop guy so we’re talking today about the future and about learning and about technology but at least for me at the heart of the matter is really this question about how we can help young people find their aquarium shop guys how do we connect them to those passionate experts that enthusiasts who not only have a ton of knowledge but who are excited about sharing it who infect young people with the enthusiasm about what they care deeply about now fast forward in about 10 years my son’s about to graduate from high school he towers over me he’s over six foot tall now and nowadays whenever something sparks his interest the first place he goes is online he googles for something he finds a youtube how-to video and he finds his aquarium shop guys in communities of interest on the internet so I think the question and the challenge in front of us for the next two days is really about you know how do we think about the new opportunities to engage young people in a context of absolute abundance of access to knowledge to information to experts to expertise when our institutions of Education were founded in an era that presumed a certain amount of scarcity right you had to go to your library or museum your classroom in order or your aquarium shop in order to gain access to experts to have special you know and the scarcity of specialized knowledge resided in these institutional frameworks whereas our kids today are growing up in a very different context much less the kids in 2030 so the question is when these kids these always connected kids encounter our infrastructures and structures for learning that were created in a very different context how do they experience that and how can we adapt to their new experiences their new opportunities now the tension between in-school and out-of-school learning of course is nothing new I mean kids have always complained about lectures being boring of past notes with each other in class these dynamics are you know have certainly predate the digital age but the context around the classroom has changed so dramatically that a lot of the ways that we’ve historically coped with this tension incentivized kids engaged kids are really not as applicable as they once were now we’ve known for quite some time that young people start their schooling years pretty engaged and eager to learn but by the time they reach our institutions of higher education most teens would be considered disengaged from learning from educate formal education and you know we often hear about and I think we’re all quite aware of the equity gaps and access to formal education I think the thing that gets less talked about is the equity gaps and access to out-of-school and informal education so this is just one of many statistics about how these gaps have been growing in the out-of-school area so this is a comparison of the poorest fifth of families in the US and the richest and their relative advice their relative investments in out of school enrichment between the 70s and 2006 and you’ll see that the poorest families have consistently invested about a thousand dollars a year per child whereas the richer families their investments have tripled from 3,000 to almost 8000 dollars per child so you put this alongside the fact that public schools are increasingly not able to deliver a lot of extracurricular activities for lower-income students and this gap is a really yawning chasm at this point and the growth of investment in out of school enrichment is not only about the fact that schools can’t necessarily deliver on all these specialized experiences but also the fact that more and more families are realizing that in order for their kids to be successful in life not only do they have to do well in school they also have to save the world a couple times and have a million followers on YouTube and you know be able to look a grown up in the eye and have perfect hair and have that firm handshake have those experiences of performing publishing competing in a public place where they get genuine recognition for being really good at something and those are the experiences that are increasingly differentiating kids learning experiences and making a difference about their success in life okay so let me make it a little bit more concrete so what I do is I hang out with kids on the internet and play video games with them and listen carefully about how they view the digital world so Talas young woman who was part of one of our research studies she was 11 when we interviewed her and she is a she was a big fan of Minecraft she learned about Minecraft at home she was playing with her cousin in the home context and because tau goes attended a fairly unique middle school Called Quest to learn which embraces a game best based pedagogy when she can went to the school and said look we want to start a Minecraft Club the teacher said sure a start a minecraft Club but she was still doing a lot of Minecraft at home and like most minecraft kids she watches a ton of Minecraft YouTube videos and she got inspired by the videos and decided that she wanted to make some herself again she brought this to the school they said sure we’ll make videos in the club and so she started writing scripts and producing these videos with her peers and teachers at school they were really supportive they encouraged her to continue this work they celebrated her by writing about her in the school newspaper and eventually these experiences connected to her desire to pursue writing and creative production within her academic settings as well so tell is an example of what we call a connected learner where she had a passionate interest which was sparked by popular culture in a video game she was in a con texe where she had supportive relationships from peers who shared her interests and adults who supported the interests and then she was also able to connect that informal learning opportunity to opportunity and recognition within the school context so this is in a nutshell what we describe as connected learning it’s basically when a kid is able to do something they care personally about have an interest or an affinity for where they have are able to engage in that interest with the support of other peers who share that interest and adults who support that interest and then the last piece is to connect it to actual opportunities for academic achievement civic engagement or career advancement and connected learning we’re not saying that all learning has to be connected all learning all the time I get a lot of pushback from educators who say well they have to learn things they’re not interested in and I get pushback from kids who say hey sometimes we want to just have fun with our friends without it all being about like getting ahead in life so that is very important but we do believe that every child should and should deserves to have the experience of connected learning because this is the kind of learning where you get the biggest bang for your buck because it’s what a kid genuinely cares about it’s about the social relationships that matter for them and this is the kind of learning that helps them find their place in the world and discover who they are now the moral of the story of towel is not that the internet creates connected learners or that minecraft creates connected learners or even that quest to learn creates connected learners in fact when in our interviews with hundreds thousands of young people what we find is that more typically young people are struggling to connect they’re learning in school and out of school struggling to connect what they’re interested in to Career Pathways and so most young people have an interest most young people have friends but also most young people are struggling to find a connection especially between their additional interests and what’s happening in school so the typical scenario is that you know they’re doing something for fun at home with their peers they may have a action to a community-based organization like a after-school Club or a museum or a library that’s informally supporting some of their interests but then and they may have some hazy idea how they want to become like a video game maker or something career-wise but the concrete connections to school environments for most young people are not there and part of the problem is that when we think of Education and we often frame it as a pipeline where the kids start there and our job is like to keep pushing them up one more step in the pipeline and that if they make it through high school if they make it through college then of course they’re gonna find their thing as a grown-up in their career but when we talk to people who are actually successful in areas that are around tech around creative pursuits that around fast-paced innovation industries what they’re learning support system looks like is more like this so the formal pipeline yes is incredibly important but there’s also a whole host of supports whether it’s in online communities whether it’s through peer groups whether it’s through museums libraries community based organization family members and this is what a real Learning Network looks like – for young people who are you know successful in these new areas now of course sometimes there are some exceptional individuals who are able to make it through the pipeline without this extraordinary set of supports but more often than not when you query people and who really supported them to become a scientist or an engineer that you know this is where the equity issue becomes very acute because more privileged kids are much more likely to say they have stem mentors within their families and communities and so on and that doesn’t get counted within our usual educational accounting about what contributed to their success so we describe connected learning as connected learning is a way of describing a form of learning so like social scientists like me go out and we find connected learning and observe it but it’s also a framework set of design principles for how we might create contexts that support connected learning and the model has really emerged out of about a decade of work and sherry was there from the very beginning that you know the digital medium learning initiative you know that McArthur funded was an anchor but it’s a much broader community that’s not just about researchers it’s definitely not a research to practice thing it’s even probably more so a practice to research kind of network where we involve researchers designers practitioners and have collaboratively been iterating on these frameworks so I would love input on this and your thoughts and in fact you know a lot of what Adam described Khan described I would love to claim as connected learning easy stuff because I really think that there’s it’s not really a new framework it’s just putting sort of names and structure and at building a community around the kind of work that a lot of folks who are doing project-based student-centered learning have been doing for quite some time and then thinking about how technology can help you know make these experiences more widely accessible to more young people so I’ll conclude just by walking through the design principles in relation to my current passion project which is a nonprofit called connected camps and the main thing we’re doing right now is providing online learning experiences in Minecraft and scratch and a few other platforms using open online platforms and communities as context for kids to do project-based learning so we chose minecraft as a focus because we find that you know put hands on projects and production is often the fastest way to or the easiest place to start when you’re thinking of designing a connected learning environment the other really important principle is what we call sponsorship of youth interests which you could also call just meeting young people where they are rather than trying to enlist them in something they’re not interested in you know meet them where there are at where the fish are already swimming in this case it’s minecraft validate it appreciate it you know choose the interest that you think can connect a stem or whatever subject you’re trying to you know connect to but to first you know identified the starting place for young people and you know when you’re designing for equity this becomes incredibly important because you want to start with the interests and identities of the young people that you’re trying to serve rather than trying to bring them in the dominant culture so this is a really important design principle and then when you design environments when we design environments we try to not just design sort of activities or things to do but the activity with it within is within a context of purposeful contribution to a community that you care about so you know for example when they call Pinkard design programs that in libraries you know they weren’t just learning how to make beats they were making a record label or they weren’t simply performing something within that space but they were participating in broader competitions in the case of our programs that connected camps what we do is we we we recruit high school and college kids who grew up with Minecraft themselves so it’s again you know within an affinity network and then they design epic builds and share challenges that excite the kids and they all do stuff together coding for example is introduced through programming turtles that can deliver mail and clean up things within the communities so that the activities are always purposeful within the context of the community and then the final design principle and I think that’s something that Colin spoke to which was really powerful is just the idea that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all way of participating so there are kids who are into creative there are kids who aren’t just survival mode there’s community leaders there’s the PR kids that kids can choose both their pathways in and their pathways you know to connect to other kinds of interests within the program so we run labs that you know after-school labs every day of the week where kids show up and can define the projects and ways that they want to participate so that’s just one example of many programs that are trying to really design not only for connected learning but also to leverage the new context of abundance that our kids are growing up in thank you [Applause] [Music]