Bottom up ICT labs

Dear Colleagues.

I just thought some of you might have an interest in a little information about the newly launched and EU Commission granted LABlearning project. The project will start on the 1st of January 2012.

The LABlearning project will address formal primary, secondary and youth education settings in many European countries aiming to experiment with new media based or media laboratory based learning activities as an alternative to the traditional classrooms.

The global Computer Clubhouse Network, located in Boston US, is a special partner in the project.

As it is not posisible to attach documents to a Comment in this forum, I have provided a small summary of the project at the end of this text. The project will allow formal educations, teachers and learners to set up different forms of media laboratory learning in the 2 year project, and the project will reflect on the lessons learned and produce useful guidance material to other educations.

It's going to be quite challenging to challenge formal educations in this way, but it will be most interesting.

In my previous comment, I argued that a stronger focus should be put on bottom up media learning practices (in schools, non-formal settings, community centres) to allow research and policy-making to learn from experiments and not just from theory or large-scale national ICT initiatives. The LABlearning project will contribute to the learning from such laboratories.

It would be extremely important to establish a global website offering good practice examples on ICT and media based learning - to tell the good stories, but also to make visible the many obstacles involved. To my knowledge such a website does not exist and it might be of great value to research and policy-making, as well as to teachers, schools and learners.
Of course, such a website should be monitored closely by researchers and analyzed systematically. Such a well-structured website would give research and educational communities access to a rich experimental material, from which much learning would emerge.

LABlearning summary

To take full advantage of new technologies, we need to fundamentally rethink our approaches to learning and education— and our ideas of how new technologies can support them.

Mitchel Resnick, MIT Media Lab - Rethinking Learning in the Digital Age

The reason that motivates the project is the fact that in many member states, many young migrants and youth who need special attention are not doing well in the education system. This poses a great and serious challenge to EU education systems, especially for primary and secondary schools as well as initial vocational training. Most research as well as everyday evidence confirms the general impression of the existence of a general mismatch between the media culture of young people in the new generations and the classroom didactics, the traditional way of organizing education in EU throughout centuries. Moreover, much evidence indicates that these groups of young people are, in fact, able to learn, and quite talented. But they learn differently than the standard-students of the traditional education system. The project aims to deliver concrete models of media based didactics to prevent drop-out, early school leaving and poor learning results. The final aim is to offer quality inspirational material to teachers and institutions.

Key outcomes of the project will be:

1. Open multimedia based web environment
2. LABlearning hand-outs explaining key elements in LABlearning
3. Inspirational guide to laboratory learning for educational managers and educational staff
4. From listening to production: lessons learned from media based LABlearning for youth at risk
5. Policy paper: adaptation or innovation?
6. Voice 1: how would we like to learn?
7. Voice 2: open online discussion platform
8. LABshops: teachers, mentors and institutional managers

The project will take the learning into the media world of youth at risk, instead of asking them to leave their media world and enter the old classrooms.

We have set up some amateurial webpages to inspire our LABlearning teachers, schools and other stakeholders, and you are welcome to take a look. We hope to be able to develop a more user-friendly inspiration material along the LABlearning project:

http://www.sosuaarhus-international.com/LABlearning.htm
http://www.sosuaarhus-international.com/Gaming.htm

Best regards,

Jan Gejel
Denmark
LABlearning partner
[email protected]