Principal Investigator: Leilah Lyons
CoPrincipal Investigator(s): Kemi Jona, Stephen Uzzo
Organization: New York Hall of Science

Abstract:
The Cyberlearning and Future Learning Technologies Program funds efforts that will help envision the next generation of learning technologies and advance what we know about how people learn in technology-rich environments. Capacity-building (CAP) projects increase the ability of researchers to understand how such technology should be designed and used in the future and supports new capacity in allowing researchers to answer questions about how people learn, how to foster or assess learning, and/or how to design for learning. This project supports a workshop in which experts in museums, informal learning, complex systems, and data science collaborate with technologists to examine what types of technologies could help track how learners behave, and learn, in museums and other informal learning locations. The workshops would lead to a written document summarizing what is known about how to track learners for these purposes, and would help spark new collaborations leading to new approaches to these problems. Ethics would be a core theme, and experts in ethics would help ensure that all approaches explored would respect the privacy of museumgoers and other learners. The intellectual merit of this project is to advance the state of the art on how we track what learners do in museums, and the broader impact would be to make it easier to design museums and other learning environments to support learners, and to allow more rigorous assessment of learning behavior in museums.

This project will conduct a three-day workshop leading to an edited volume on technology-enabled visitor metrics in museums and other science and technology centers. The leadership team includes expertise in learning sciences, computer science, interaction design, complex systems, and informal science education, and the workshop will additionally be supported by an advisory committee including experts in educational performance assessment and psychometrics, learning analytics, cross-cultural and cross-setting sociocultural learning theory, and educational policy. Workshop invitees will be recruited to include participants from several categories, including learning sciences, data sciences and learning analytics, informal science education and museum design, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, and data ethics. An embedded evaluation will interview participants after the workshops to gauge whether the meeting spurred new research collaborations.