Creating a Learning Revolution

Children are the future. If we hope to solve the world's major problems -- achieving world peace, healthy lives, economic development, and global sustainability -- we must provide richer learning opportunities for the world's children. An educated and creative population is, without a doubt, the best path to global health, wealth, and peace.

But throughout today's world, educational practices are woefully outdated. Even as scientific and technological advances have radically transformed agriculture, medicine, and industry, the way children learn has remained largely unchanged, based on ideas inherited from previous centuries.

New digital technologies are now providing an historic opportunity for fundamental and global-scale changes in children's learning and education. Just as advances in biotechnologies made possible the "green revolution" in agriculture, digital technologies are making possible a "learning revolution" in education. We believe that these new digital technologies can (and should) transform not only how children learn, but also what children learn, and who they learn with.

• How children learn. Digital technologies can enable children to become more active and independent learners, taking charge of their own learning through direct exploration, expression, and experience. The focus shifts from "being taught" to "learning."

• What children learn. Much of what children learn in schools today was designed for the era of paper-and-pencil. With new digital technologies, children can undertake projects (and learn concepts) that were seen as too complex for children in the pre-digital era.

• Who children learn with. Global connectedness can enable new "knowledge-building communities" in which children (and adults) around the globe collaborate on projects and learn from one another. These efforts require new multicultural, multilingual, and multimodal approaches to learning.

Guiding Principles

In our work towards this goal, we are guided by the following principles:

• Direct exploration. The traditional view is that children learn about the world directly (by crawling, touching, chewing -- that is, by exploring) until preschool, but then they need to be "taught" more advanced ideas. Our goal is to develop digital technologies that enable children to continue to learn ever more advanced ideas by direct exploration and experimentation. For example, children who live in remote villages should be able to contribute directly to their community's agricultural efforts by using computers connected globally to the Internet, and locally to sensors, to run experiments on the quality of soil, air, and vegetation.

• Direct expression. New media will enable children to relate their own stories and ideas -- and relate them to a much broader and more diverse audience -- rather than having adults do the talking for them. The traditional view is that children should focus on "absorbing" ideas from adults, not on expressing their own ideas. Even what children know about themselves and their culture is what they hear from adults. Our goal is to go beyond this traditional view and develop digital technologies that enable children to express themselves to others through storytelling, communicating, designing, and inventing in new ways -- in effect, to find their own voice.

• Direct experience. In the future, children will no longer rely only on their parents for reports of the great big world out there. Instead, they will experience it directly through their own personal contacts with other people around the globe. Through electronic eyes and ears, they will be able to see how the other side of the world looks and sounds. This experience will diminish the impact of national frontiers, although local cultures -- what children experience in their own schoolyards and homes -- will remain important. Perhaps most important, children will develop a different sense of themselves as intellectual agents -- as valuable members of real and virtual communities. Children will become accustomed to expressing themselves across boundaries of geography, culture, language, and age.

• Multicultural. Most technologies support only a limited set of cultural styles and approaches. With global connectedness comes both a need and an opportunity for more encompassing approaches, encouraging participation by children from all different cultures. Our goal is to develop new digital technologies that provide multiple paths of entry and multiple patterns of use, while also encouraging children around the world to share and learn about one another's cultural traditions.

• Multilingual. To date, the great variety of languages spoken around the world has been perceived as a major obstacle to the development of a global community. With global connectedness comes an ever greater need for children to "speak a common language," and an ever greater opportunity for children to learn more about one another's languages -- and about language in general. Our goal is to develop new tools that enable children to communicate with one another across linguistic boundaries, while supporting their learning of other languages, and enhancing the value of their own.

• Multimodal. The channels of communication between children and computers have been extremely limited: keystrokes and mouse clicks in one direction, text and graphics in the other. By enabling computers to understand and produce gestures and other forms of nonverbal communication, we will enrich the nature of the interaction between children and computers. By the same token, computers that understand verbal and nonverbal communication can open up computing to a broader range of ages and cultural traditions (including non-literate people). That is, children who cannot (yet) type, can certainly speak and gesture in the direction of their computer, and understand the speech and gesture that the computer returns.

New Initiatives

Mitchel Resnick is Associate Professor at the MIT Media Laboratory, where is domain of research is how new technological tools can help bring about deep changes in how people think and learn. He is co-founder of the Computer Clubhouse, an afterschool learning centre for youth from under-served communities.

Justine Cassell is faculty at MIT's Media Laboratory. Her domain of research and interest is how autonomous agents and toys can be designed with psychosocial competencies, based on an understanding of human lingusistic, cognitive and social abilities.

Together they are working on many of the ideas in research projects at the MIT Media Lab, and are planning to create a major new research center that focuses explicitly on issues of children and learning. They also work closely with 2B1, a new foundation that supports innovative educational uses of computers in the developing world.