The Cutting Edge of Informal Learning: Makers, Mobile, and More!

by
Back to Primers

Authors: Sherry Hsi, Shuchi Grover
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Overview

Cyberlearning spans in-school and out-of-school learning — and these days, a lot of meaningful learning is taking place outside of classrooms. Amateur designers, students, and artists are teaching themselves and each how to make their own electronic toys, program flying robots, or manufacture custom-designed parts with 3D printers and desktop milling machines. Families are doing science together through making backyard instruments to collect local environmental data and share their data online with other global citizen scientists (Anastopoulou et al., 2011; see Cornell Lab of Ornithology). Kindergarteners to senior citizens are combining traditional physical materials like paper, yarn and fabric, together with digital materials like electronics and sensors to create new homespun fashions, to design useful products, and to pursue their interests. (Buechley, Peppler, Eisenberg, & Kafai, 2013; Peppler & Glosson, 2013.) Important learning is also taking place in public libraries where librarians invite youth to author digital stories, produce new media, and publish personally-relevant stories while museums are hosting workshops to reach different audiences (IMLS, 2014; NYSCI, 2013). These learning experiences prove to be highly influential in the choices that youth make about further education, career pathways, and participation as citizens.

In contrast to traditional classroom learning, informal learning is often:

  • interest-driven: learners engage based on their interests, not an externally mandated curriculum.
  • learner-centric: adults help as guides, facilitators, coaches, and mentors, but the role is to support the learner, rather than to regulate the content, pace, and progress
  • playful in approaches: informal experiences tend to engage participant’s imagination, encourage exploration, allow tinkering, celebrate teamwork, and take failure in stride, unlike traditional didactic school experiences
  • multigenerational: participants often include be children, parents, and senior citizens learning side by side
  • intrinsically assessed: outcomes tend to be tangible and readily appreciated by the participants, with less reliance on formal, standardized tests as outcomes

Informal learning institutions like museums with both structured and unstructured activities by themselves don’t guarantee a meaningful learning experience. Today’s informal learning more often also emphasizes:

  • active engagement: the physical space provides unique affordances for doing, not just collections to be viewed
  • building materials: the glass between the learner and the artifact is gone, learners are expected to construct not just appreciate
  • multiple representations: learners are encouraged to engage with an idea through multiple media, such as storytelling, sketching, constructing, simulating, visualizing, role-playing, discussing socially
  • learning trajectories: the informal experience is less contained to a specific space and time, but may span multiple visits or connect to home, to community, or to school.

The movement among “Makers” is one prominent example of today’s approach to informal learning and an important arena for cyberlearning advances. Making is “a class of activities focused on designing, building, modifying, and/or repurposing material objects, for playful or useful ends, oriented toward making a ‘‘product’’ of some sort that can be used, interacted with, or demonstrated. Making often involves traditional craft and hobby techniques (e.g., sewing, woodworking, etc.), and it often involves the use of digital technologies, either for manufacture (e.g., laser cutters, CNC machines, 3D printers) or within the design (e.g., microcontrollers, LEDs)” (Martin, 2015). Makers are people who openly share tools, knowledge, and materials who value learning and creativity over profit and social capital (Kuznetsov & Paulos, 2010). From creating new artifacts, hacking software, or repurposing objects, makers are highly motivated, interest-driven learners that seek out new experiences and actively share what they learn in a community. Informal settings, such as science museums, increasingly host making experiences and digital technology is frequently used to enhance the opportunities for learning in these experiences. Martin (2015) provides a comprehensive synthesis of making and argues against a tool-centric approach to bringing making into classrooms. He contends that in order to understand the promise of making in education, educators need to appreciate all three interconnected elements of making-“(1) digital tools, including rapid prototyping tools and low-cost microcontroller platforms, that characterize many making projects, 2) community infrastructure, including online resources and in-person spaces and events, and 3) the maker mindset, values, beliefs, and dispositions that are commonplace within the community” (p. 31).

This kind of informal learning aligns well with educational research about authentic, active education that happens in a social community. Education research has shown that meaningful learning is situated in authentic practices using inquiry-based approaches to solve relevant problems, sharing skills in a community of others, and making meaning through activity and action (Wenger, 1998). Whether using physical or digital materials, learning is mediated by multiple media representations and facilitated through direct experiences and interactions mentored by disciplinary experts, more expert peers and novices in a social community of practice (Lave, 1991). Episodic and distributed, learning is interest-driven, serendipitous, sometimes sustained with access to a network of human and technical resources in their community.

Technology is playing a big role in the maker community to enhance informal learning and to better connect informal with formal learning. The maker community leverages online information extensively from using tutorials, online forums, open shared code libraries, social media, and digital video platforms that connect different aged learners to contribute, discuss ideas, share tips, and self-publish instructional videos. Maker communities also use digital fabrication and a network of physical spaces like community workshops, FabLabs, and tech shops, that allow use of shared manufacturing tools to realize their digital imagined and physically implemented projects. These spaces host novice friendly software for programming, computer-aided design, and digital media production. These same tools and software enable control of microprocessors that are used by robotics clubs to get more fluent in coding and learn computer science concepts and computational thinking. Within blended learning environments, smart phones offer digital access to content and limitless knowledge via ubiquitous, wireless access to the Internet while makers meet in physical communities, festivals, and faires to build, experiment, and test their designs. Physical computing devices ranging from programmable maker technologies like Arduino, servo motors, 3D printers, to computer-controlled milling machines help foster new ways to learn through collaborative computer-aided design, online research, and documentation (Halverson & Sheridan, 2014; MakerEd, 2014; Martinez & Stager, 2013).

However, for technology use to reflect cyberlearning ideals, technology must be more than resource in a learning activity: it must enable the design of activities that connect to what we know about how people learn and thus enhance learning. Thus, a cyberlearning approach to maker activities does not over-emphasize the materials used or the thing made. A focus on the materials or things can sometimes lead to cookbook recipes, narrow instruction, and standardized expectations, ending up in an experience not much different from poor schooling. A cyberlearning view emphasizes the transactions among students, materials, and the social setting — and how those transactions provide students opportunities to explore, investigate, test, and refine their knowledge and abilities. Technologies provide more than a resource for building when they enable students to better represent concepts, to gather data and analyze it, to share knowledge with peers, to discuss theories and construct explanations, to critique and suggest improvements, and to reflect on their own learning.

Cyberlearning projects in informal learning can also go beyond maker experiences, too:

  • Mobile devices can provide a layer of augmented reality as learners explore an important physical space
  • Museum exhibits can invite visitors to learn via new modes of interacting with the setting and visualizing phenomena
  • Sensors and cameras can enable citizen science investigations

Several aspects of learning theory are particularly useful to cyberlearning in informal settings for studying and understanding individual learning and learning that happens in a shared, public environment or social community. More specifically:

  • Constructivism and constructionism provide long-standing ways to conceptualize learning through doing.
  • Identity is concerned with how learners’ sense of who they are and who they can become is shaped through opportunities to explore their interests, values, commitments, and convictions in relation to their participation and engagement with others, new ideas, activities, and phenomena. Further, youth are drawn to expressing identity through new, social media.
  • Embodied cognition considers how doing and experiencing in a bodily way leads to learning and connects with learning that may later become more de-contextualized and abstract, and can often involve tangible interfaces.
  • Collaborative learning or more broadly, social learning, provides traditions for designing effective learning experiences for groups and for analyzing social interactions for insights about learning

Cyberlearning is poised to contribute to transforming STEM education by using learning theory and technology to enhance powerful grassroots movements in informal learning and develop entirely new informal experiences. Cyberlearning research is needed both to contribute to design, but also to document how people learn in these new experiences and how learning is improved. Further, cyberlearning is well-positioned to connect these informal advances to issues in school learning. For example, schools are looking to the maker community for ideas about how to teach science and design solutions to problem-based challenges. Teachers see making as way as to support inquiry, project-based learning, authentic problem-solving, and deeper discussions (Honey & Kanter, 2013). Educational leaders see the potential to engage greater numbers of underrepresented groups in STEM-related activities including encouraging more girls and women to pursue computer science to help develop a more diverse technological workforce (Fried & Wetsone, 2014).

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