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Blended Learning Revisited

John Seely Brown Dava Newman SM '89, PhD '92 John Belcher: March 10, 2010; Running Time: 1:36:47

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

Even when children are high achievers and facile with new technology, many seem gradually to lose their sense of wonder and curiosity, notes John Seely Brown. Traditional educational methods may be smothering their innate drive to explore the world. Brown and like-minded colleagues are developing the underpinnings for a new 21st century pedagogy that broadens rather than narrows horizons.

John Seely Brown, former chief scientist at Xerox, has morphed in recent years into the “Chief of Confusion,” seeking “the right questions” in a range of fields, including education. He finds unusual sources for his questions: basketball and opera coaches, surfing and video game champions. He’s gathered insights from unorthodox venues, and from more traditional classrooms, to paint quite a different picture of what learning might look like.

The typical college lecture class frequently gathers many students together in a large room to be ‘fed’ knowledge, believes Brown. But studies show that “learning itself is socially constructed,” and is most effective when students interact with and teach each other in manageable groups. Brown wants to open up “niche learning experiences” that draw on classic course material, but deepen it to be maximally enriching.

In basketball and opera master classes, and in architecture labs, he has seen how individuals become acculturated in a “community of practice,” learning to “be” rather than simply to “do.” Whether performing, creating, or experimenting, students are critiqued, respond, offer their own criticism, and glean rich wisdom from a cyclical group experience. Brown says something “mysterious” may be taking place: “In deeply collective engagement in processes...you start to marinate in a problem space.” Through communities of practice, students’ minds “begin to gel up,” even in the face of abstraction and unfamiliarity, and “all of a sudden, (the subject) starts to make sense.”

Brown cites the entire MIT campus as a “participatory learning platform,” where “people create stuff to be read and tried and critiqued,” where cognitive “apprenticeships” lead to networks of practice. “Deep tinkering” is encouraged, which accelerates the building of instinct that is essential in creating a “tacit dimension” of familiarity with complex subject matter. This is “playing at its deepest sense,” says Brown, and the way to create resilient students who “learn to become,” and “don’t fear change” in a world full of flux.

Dava Newman has been looking for ways to keep MIT engineering students motivated and playful. She is working on design and build courses for engineering students that emphasize community and creativity. Engineering School planners are also considering a new degree option intended to prepare students “to tackle complex socio-technological challenges in energy, the environment, hunger,” since students say they come to MIT in order to learn how to address such complex, real-world problems.

MIT Physics Professor John Belcher describes virtual laboratories complete with avatars that help students visualize key concepts in the field, such as Faraday’s Law (“where everyone dies in electromagnetism”). Students eagerly engage in these virtual labs, which are accompanied by actual experiments, and create effective online communities for maximizing the experience.

Lecture Details

Location: 32-141

“Playing at its deepest sense -- making, testing, trying, riddling the system -- that’s the thing.... If that isn’t an interesting description of deep research, I don’t know what is.”

John Seely Brown

About the Speakers

John Seely Brown

Visiting Scholar, University of Southern California Former Chief Scientist, Xerox Corporation and Former Director, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)

John Seely Brown left as Director of Xerox-PARC in June 2000, and stepped down as Xerox Corporation Chief Scientist in April 2002. He has published more than 100 papers in scientific journals and was awarded the Harvard Business Review's 1991 McKinsey Award for his article, "Research that Reinvents the Corporation" and again in 2002 for his article (with John Hagel) “Your Next IT Strategy.”

His latest book, The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialization, written with John Hagel, was published in the spring of 2005 by Harvard Business School Press.

Brown is a member of the National Academy of Education and a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and of AAAS, and a Trustee of Brown University, the MacArthur Foundation and In-Q-Tel.

He received an A.B. from Brown University in 1962 in Mathematics and Physics and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1970 in Computer and Communication Sciences.

Dava Newman SM '89, PhD '92

Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering Systems Director of Technology and Policy Program and MacVicar Faculty Fellow

Professor Dava Newman is currently the director of the Technology and Policy Program and a MacVicar Faculty Fellow at MIT. She is professor of Aeronautics and the Astronautics and Engineering Systems Division as well as an affiliate faculty in the Harvard-MIT Health, Sciences and Technology Division. Professor Newman’s research contributes to the fundamental knowledge of human performance in extreme environments by interweaving biomechanics, human factors engineering, modeling, and design.

In the space environment, she quantifies astronaut motion and studies the subtle mechanisms underlying neuron-musculoskeletal adaptation, which are not easily studied on earth. She is currently developing her fourth space flight experiment, the MICRO-G experiment, which will fly on the International Space Station in a few years.

Newman is concurrently designing a revolutionary, advanced spacesuit for future exploration missions, the BioSuit System, which she targets for 2020. She has been honored with a NASA Manned Flight Awareness Team Award and a NASA Group Achievement Award. She is a recognized AIAA Distinguished Lecturer and recently received the National Aerospace Educator Award.

In addition to teaching classes in leadership and engineering at MIT, she has published and presented more than 200 papers in refereed journals and at conferences and other professional groups. She is a regular speaker and participant at engineering conferences given by groups such as the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) and International Design for Extreme Environments Assembly (IDEEA) among many others. In 2001, she published her first book entitled Interactive Aerospace Engineering and Design.

Newman earned a Ph.D. from MIT in Aeronautics, Biomedicine and Engineering.

John Belcher

Class of '22 Professor of Physics
MacVicar Faculty Fellow

John Belcher came to MIT in 1971 to work with Professors Herbert Bridge and Alan Lazarus and the Space Plasma Group. He became part of a team that studied the Voyager mission to Jupiter and Saturn. After reaching these two planets, as well as Uranus and Neptune, Voyager is still going strong. In its most recent incarnation, it is referred to as the Voyager Interstellar Mission. Within the next 20 years, it is probable that the MIT plasma instrument on Voyager 2 will make measurements in the interstellar medium.

Belcher has twice received the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal, once for contributions to the understanding of the plasma dynamics of the Jovian magnetosphere, in 1980, and once for his role as principal investigator on the Plasma Science Experiment on Voyager during the Neptune encounter, in 1990. In 2004, the Institute awarded Belcher with the Class of '22 professorship, designed to honor "a tenured faculty member with a record of excellence in education, with respect to both curriculum development and classroom teaching." In July 2007, Belcher was named Division Head for Astrophysics. He received his undergraduate degree (with a double major in math and physics) from Rice University. He earned a Ph.D. in Physics from Caltech.

About the Host

About the Host

MIT Teaching and Learning Laboratory

The MIT Teaching and Learning Laboratory collaborates with faculty, teaching assistants, and students to promote excellence in teaching and learning throughout the Institute. Our work contributes to MIT's commitment to educational innovation and its standing as a leader in science and engineering education