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Vol.30 No.2, April 1998
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The Learning Communities Lab (LCL) came into being in July, 1996 within the Advanced Technology Group at Apple, Much of the work reported in the papers that follow took place between July 1996 and October 1997. Currently, the research work in the learning space is driven by Apple's Learning Technology Group, now within Apple Education (http://www.apple.com/education/). The focus of Apple's Learning Community Lab was on distributed learning and learner-centered design tools. Distributed learning enables learning for anyone, anytime, anyplace. It's the cornerstone of an integrated framework of technology and learning experiences that work together to extend the reach of learning from beyond the traditional classroom to: the home, the community, libraries of schools, colleges and nations; to research labs in universities, industry, government; to the work place, to local communities and to communities around the world.
LCL was a design and engineering group that included a number of engineers, computer scientists and social scientists, with expertise in community cultures and learning environments and in the evaluation and design of learning materials.
The work of the Learning Communities Lab focused on the `three Cs': conversations, contexts and communities -- elements that are going to be fundamental to distributed learning in the future. Tools under development are based on research that shows people learn best when engrossed in the topic and are motivated to seek out new knowledge and skills because they need them in order to solve the problem at hand.
For substantive learning to take place, students need to engage in conversations with other teachers and students in which they develop, represent, evaluate ideas and become part of the fabric of their `own' community.
New portable computing devices, such as the Macintosh PowerBook, eMate, and Newton MessagePad, allow students to learn from experience and gather information in authentic contexts, rather than in isolated classrooms.
Local and online communities can be gathered together to enhance learning of a particular topic. Techniques for engaging individuals with expertise and a range of learning approaches are critical for online learning communities to succeed.
Most importantly, LCL was organized as a living lab: an environment where we could `play' with practicing the theories being built. This was our greatest challenge and in retrospect proved to be the most gratifying.
The papers in this section report investigations that were carried out at the Learning Communities Lab within the framework of the three C's.
In addition to these investigations reported there were two major educational research programs that were part of the Learning Communities Lab:
1. Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow (ACOT) is a research and development collaboration among public schools, universities, research agencies, and Apple Computer, Inc. Initiated in 1985, ACOT began its work in seven classrooms that represented a cross section of America's elementary and secondary schools. Its goal is to study how the routine use of technology by teachers and students might change teaching and learning. Over more than 10 years, ACOT has studied learning, assessment, teaching, teacher development, school design, the social aspects of education, and the use of new technologies in more than 100 elementary and secondary classrooms throughout the country. After a solid decade of research, the ACOT project is one of the longest continuing educational studies of its kind. (http://www.research.apple.com/go/acot/)
2. The Educational Object Economy is an investigation to explore how online communities can be spawned for creating a shared economy for bootstrapping software for education. The Object Economy is currently focusing on building a large set (10,000) of Java Objects and is accessible on the Web (http://trp.research.apple.com/).
Currently, N. Rao Machiraju is Principal Scientist and Manager of the Learning Technology Group at Apple Computer, Inc. Prior to this position he was the head of the Learning Communities Lab in the Advanced Technology Group.
N. Rao Machiraju:
email: machiraju@apple.com
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