Everyday Learning - International Symposium

Media Lab Europe is an international
research and innovation centre and
the European research partner of the
MIT Media Lab. Media Lab Europe is a not-for-profit organisation that supports
its work through corporate, community,
academic, and public research partnerships.

2004/2005 Symposium co-coordinator:
Carol Strohecker
Senior Research Scientist, Media Lab Europe
Director, Everyday Learning

Contact: Carol Strohecker
www.carolstrohecker.info

Last update

At Media Lab Europe we are developing technologies to help elicit and articulate diversity among people of varying ages, genders, cultural backgrounds, and interests. Technologies such as environmental and physiological sensors are enabling us to address new kinds of knowledge, and improved computational capabilities are enabling us to represent ideas in multiple ways – so that different people could find them meaningful and individuals could come to understand them more deeply.

We support and study learning by inventing tools and situations for people to bring the imperceptible into the realm of the senses, the unconscious into the realm of awareness, and the conscious into the realm of the understood.

Bringing the imperceptible into the realm of the senses
Our faculties for seeing, hearing, and touching enable rich perceptions of the world around us. How can new sensing technologies augment these capabilities? How can technology developers understand the complementary workings of our sensoria and represent new perceptions?

Bringing the unconscious into the realm of awareness
We think and do many things without even realizing we are doing them. How might technologies become “mirrors” for these processes, revealing our own inner workings so that we can reflect on them, learn to control them, and possibly to change them?

Bringing the conscious into the realm of the understood
People are the makers of their own knowledge. How can we use technologies to form tools and environments with and in which people can experiment with ideas, express their changing conceptions and feelings, and exchange these expressions with others?

Acknowledgments: We are grateful to the organisers of the EU Presidency conference for supporting production of the Learning Research brochure; to obtain a copy, please contact Claire Mahoney. Thanks also to the many people helped with the brochure, the events, and the web site: all of Media Lab Europe's facilities and administrative staffs, particularly Lia O'Sullivan, Emma Coyle, Sorcha Duggan, Claire Mahoney, and Sandra O'Neill; and members of Everyday Learning, especially Karen Flannery, Deirdre Williams, Brendan Donovan, Andrea Taylor, Mike Ananny, Zoltan Foley-Fisher, and Karen Martin.