metaStudio a collaborative workspace to reshape education!

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@ 11:59 AM on 22 Jul, 2011

I will answer this question, along with the question, what is metaStudio?

In a /constructionist/ approach to learning and education as put

forth by Seymour Papert, one of the ideas is that the learning

happens through design.

Constructionism, per se involves two types of constructions. One of

them is derived from Piaget, the constructivist theory of knowledge,

which is based on the idea that learning is an active process, in

which people construct knowledge from their own experiences in the

world. To this idea, contructionism adds that people construct new

knowledge with particular effectiveness when they are actively

engaged in constructing products that are personally meaningful.

Now these constructions can be varied and from all parts of

life. Different things may be meaningful to different people

depending on their personal choices and / or their skill sets. Each

of the contruction presents a different set of problems to people

who are involved and while designing the solutions to the

construction problems at hand a lot of learning happens. A context

in which you provide the learner with tools and equipment to design

and execute the construction is called as a /studio/. This term is

derived from the artist’s studio where apprentice are trained while

doing their work. Such studios need not be physical only, they can

be digital as well. We have ample of examples to present the idea of

digital learning studio. In fact Sugar the operating system on the One

Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project derives from the constructionist

ideas. But apart from this, many of constructions which are /not/ a

part of the traditional school system, but are a part of our

close-to-life experiences may become contexts in which learning can

happen. The requirements for such contexts to become rich source of

learning opportunities depends on whether the learners are actively

engaged in the creating that is meaningful to them and others around

them.

Contrasted with what is known as instructionism, in which the main

focus is on the new ways to instruct, constructionism focuses on new

ways for learners to construct. Thus major challenge for educators

and educational developers who believe in the constructionist way of

learning is to create tools and environments that engage learners in

construction, invention, and experimentation. This means that we

need to design the `learning studios’. This involves a higher level

(meta level) of design:

We need to design things, which will enable students to design things.

Thus metaStudio is a design studio, where we will be designing other

learning, designing studios. That means that it is a studio of

studios, hence the name metaStudio!

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