Shawn
For the last dozen or so years, I've been fascinated by trying to put the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Lev Vygotsky, and Alexander Luria to work understanding how people learn in their free time as well as the contextual, institutional and cultural supports for and constraints on how that learning happens. Since 2004, I've been doing that work at HMSC, using the VC as a lab. I've been focused recently on learning from interactions with live animals and learning with and from complex scientific visualizations. I'm excited about the new lab as it will help me to blend my interest in documenting learning with my interest in creating communicative tools that shape cognition.
Posted by
Shawn on Wednesday, October 31st 2012
A nice article on some of our current efforts came out today in Oregon Sea Grant’s publication, Confluence. You can read the story on-line at http://seagrant.oregonstate.edu/confluence/1-3/free-choice-learning. One of the hardest things to try to describe to Nathan Gilles who wrote the article (and to the folks who reviewed the draft) is the idea that in [...]
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by
Shawn on Wednesday, April 25th 2012
Last Friday, Nancy Steinberg, a freelance science writer, and I held a Science Pub Dialogue Event at Rogue Ales across the street from HMSC. We had about 50 folks in the audience, pretty normal for the science pubs sponsored by HMSC. But Nancy and I didn’t want to do a traditional scientist presentation. Instead, following [...]
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by
Shawn on Friday, February 3rd 2012
How do we analyze and study something familiar and taken for granted? How do we take account of the myriad modes of communication and media that are part of practically everything that we do, including learning? One of the biggest challenges we face studying learning (especially in a museum) is documenting meaningful aspects of what [...]
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by
Shawn on Thursday, October 13th 2011
The FCL Lab is the fruit of 7 years of work to imagine creating a center for studying free-choice learning in the Visitors Center at HMSC. Tremendous support from Oregon Sea Grant’s current director, Steve Brandt, and former director, Bob Malouf, as well as sage leadership advice from former Associate Directo, Jay Rasmussen, and current [...]
Read the rest of this entry »
