Notes  on  World  IA  Day  130209    Glad  to  be  here  and  welcome  to  Vanderbilt  University.  Thanks  to  the  Vanderbilt  Library  and  Dean  Connie  Dowell  for  making  this  space  available  for  a  community  event.    More  selfishly,  I  want  to  welcome  IA  and  ID  folk  on  behalf  of  the  Learning  Sciences  and  Learning  Environments  Design  program  in  the  Department  of  Teaching  and  Learning  in  Peabody  College.  We  have  both  a  PhD  and  a  MEd  program  if  you  are  interested.  Pratim  Sengupta,  also  on  this  panel  is  one  of  our  most  active  faculty  in  this  area,  which  also  includes  Doug  Clark  and  Melissa  Gresalfi  as  core  faculty.    As  part  of  these  programs,  I  help  lead  something  we  call  the  Spatial  Learning  and  Mobility  or  SLaM  group.  These  are  faculty  and  students  interested  in  the  role  of  space  and  personal  mobility  in  learning.  We  are  trying  to  grow  a  “hive”  of  people  interested  in  learning  and  design,  which  might  include  many  of  you.  So  my  comments  this  morning  are  geared  to  that.    My  background  is  in  computer  science,  AI  and  machine  learning,  so  I  was  trained  to  think  of  information  and  architecture  as  arrangements  for  organizing  and  serving  up  what  is  already  known,  in  ways  that  are  efficient,  reliable,  and  useful  to  users.  These  are  all  good  things,  of  course.      But  what  about  IA  and  ID  could  serve  learning?  How  could  we  create  information  environments  that  are  also:    •  invitations  to  learning,    •  vivid  and  memorable,    •  relevant  to  the  everyday  lives  of  learners  (young  people  or  adults),  and    •  places  in  which  it  is  easy  to  make  things  that  are  genuinely  new?    Since  computing  has  spilled  off  of  desktops  into  just  about  every  area  of  life,  and  also  since  information  now  accumulates  about  many  aspect  of  personal  and  public  life,  this  is  a  great  time  to  be  asking  these  questions.      Since  efficiency  is  good,  I’d  like  to  share  two  concepts  that  may  encourage  you  to  keep  asking  about  learning  as  the  day  progresses.    The  first  concerns  how  information  spaces  layer  up  in  ways  that  impact  or  could  support  learning.  What  I  have  in  mind  here  are  relations  between  spaces  of:    •  consumption  (e.g.,  What  is  in  your  browsing  and  purchasing  history?),    •  social  connection  (e.g.,  Who  are  your  friends  on  Facebook?),  and    

•  time  geography  (e.g.,  Where  have  you  been,  where  are  you  now,  what  are  you  near,  and  where  are  you  headed?).    

*The  concept  of  time  geography  may  not  be  familiar—think  about  where  you  go  on  a  typical  day,  literally  as  a  trail  in  space-­‐time.  There  is  a  rich  story  of  constraints  here,  but  also  one  of  desire,  habit,  and  identity.  What  would  your  daily  round  look  like  over  the  surface  of  a  temporally  animated  map?  

   My  sense  of  the  situation,  now,  is  that  people  (individuals)  generate  these  spaces  through  their  activity,  but  information  about  their  traversals  in  these  spaces  tends  to  be  archived  and  used  by  other  entities.  The  FCC  is  increasingly  focused  on  what  are  acceptable  uses.    But  how  could  we  use  these  layers  and  selective  relations  among  them  to  support  learning?      The  most  obvious,  though  maybe  not  the  most  powerful  answer,  is  to  use  layered  information  to  teach.  If  you  are  near  a  cultural  asset  that  might  interest  you,  given  your  history  of  information  browsing,  a  “learning  advisory  feed”  could  alert  you  to  some  nearby  opportunity  to  learn.  We  know  this  is  possible,  since  your  smart  phone  can  already  alert  you  to  a  lingerie  or  chocolate  sale  in  the  local  mall,  depending  on  your  history  of  consumption.    Agency  comes  from  the  outside  in  this  concept  of  teaching.  How  could  we  design  tools  that  allow  people  to  tailor  relations  between  these  layers,  selectively?      We  think  of  this  as  a  kind  of  “meshworking”—learners  actively  build  tour-­‐like  structures  that  create  and  archive  relations  between  these  layered  spaces.  Their  minds  are  “extended”  in  this  way  (as  minds  have  always  been,  with  calendars,  lists,  etc.),  and  they  can  share  the  meshwork  with  others.    This  leads  to  a  second  concept  that  I’d  like  to  offer  for  thinking  about  learning  today.    Learning  happens  at  different  scales—momentary  activity,  personal  biography,  history  in  social  groups—so  building  meshworks  between  layers  of  information  will  need  to  accommodate  these  different  scales.  And  this  means  that  learners,  in  some  fashion,  will  need  to  become  curators  of  their  own  knowing  and  capacities  for  activity.    We  think  this  is  a  big  deal,  but  we  really  do  not  understand  it  very  well.  Why  would  learners  want  to  or  need  to  curate?  Do  they  already  do  it?      We  are  just  starting  to  study  this,  and  to  design  for  it.  We  think  that  IA  as  a  field  has  a  lot  to  offer  here.  We  know  that  kids  intensely  curate  and  share  information—think  Reddit,  SubReddits,  and  meta-­‐Reddits  that  build  domain  maps.  We  also  know  that  many  

wonderful  public  archives,  like  this  library,  are  intensely  and  professionally  curated  spaces.    Where  do  these  curatorial  practices  meet—what  kind  of  interface  do  we  want  between  curated  and  contributed  information?      I  hope  these  two  concepts—meshworking  and  curatorial  practice—are  helpful  for  thinking  about  learning  as  World  IA  day  proceeds.  Thanks.