Media everywhere

Whether it is exams, paper preparation, literature search; students today have everything online. Going to the library no longer presupposes walking. Working through the shelves has become a figure of speech. However, exactly what happens to learning and the acquisition of knowledge is a matter of research — a lot of it, in different contexts and from different perspectives. Researching the effect of learning media is a common theme in many research fields. Understanding various tools at hand is an aspect of making use of them. Awareness of how students measure and compare lectures and lecturers with TedTalk “stars” is yet another aspect of how to approach that fact: Students and educators today work and interact in a context of media ubiquity.

Collaborative learning requires collaborative thinking, which in turns implies a change in our conceptions of the teacher. As the familiar saying goes: From the idea of the teacher as preacher or the sage on the stage, designing new learning interactions introduces new ideas of tutorship and coaching, chance and serendipity. Learning acquires a dynamics more related to games, gamified learning and game based learning in the sense that multiple narratives move at parallell speeds, providing students and learners with different avenues forward, backward, ans sidewards.

In this research theme, Future Learning Lab engages in the design, production, execution and evaluation of new learning designs.