12662 OL: Place-shifting Learning

Organizers: Jared Lamenzo, Craig Langlois, Richard Scullin

This talk focuses on the results of a collaboration between Berkshire Arts and Technology Charter School (BART), The Berkshire Museum (Pittsfield, MA), and OpenPath. BART’s model puts art and technology at the center of learners’ experiences; oftentimes, it is difficult to get students out of the classroom to encounter art or gain the insight of practitioners. Recently, BART teamed up with OpenPath, a real-time, browser-based interactive video service for learning. In the pilot, the museum is a lab for learning about art, culture, and science. The Berkshire Museum–whose mission is to inspire connections among art, history, and natural science–was ideal. Mentors at the museum, as well as educators at BART, facilitate students to select a work that is meaningful to them and present it to their peers back at school. These students then generate questions for their own investigations, creating a feedback loop. The goal of the pilot is to help define a replicable and equitable model that gives learners agency for their interest-driven learning, using browser technologies found on billions of devices. Presupposing a learner has access to a mobile device and wifi (in a park, museum, school, et al.), there are numerous ways learning can be refigured, some messy, open-ended and exciting. The pilot was supported in part by the National Writing Project Educator Innovator Fund, with initial development support from the Mozilla Foundation, NSF, and US Ignite.