Informal Learning – Where Learning, Life, and Technology Converge

The Harvard Club of Ottawa is pleased to welcome Harvard Senior Lecturer and Faculty Chair of Learning Design, Innovation, and Technology, Prof. Joe Blatt for a talk about informal learning in childhood and beyond. Please join us at Elmwood School, who have generously offered to be our venue partner and will be hosting refreshments following the talk.

Prof. Blatt’s Talk Description:

Throughout our lives – even in childhood and adolescence – we learn more in the time we spend outside school than in the classroom. Like the Bourgeois Gentilhomme in Moliere’s play, we are often learning even when we don’t know we are doing it. In this presentation I will explore the world of informal learning: what it looks like, how it happens, and what educators can do to take advantage of it. I will illustrate how informal learning, both deliberate and unconscious, suffuses our lives, and how this phenomenon has particular impact and unique potential in childhood. Among the questions I plan to tackle: What are the avenues through which children and young people experience informal learning? Technology is a ubiquitous and powerful informal learning source for children and young people – so how can we distinguish between media that enrich their social and cognitive development and media that are a potential threat to healthy growing up? What lies behind the documented success of Sesame Street, now more than 50 years old and still spreading to new regions of the globe? What roles can parents play in helping children get a head start on learning – and does this really matter in the long run? I plan to speculate briefly on the future of the promising but also fraught relationship between technology and children’s healthy development, and I hope to engage participants in discussion, reflection, and interaction.

Apps to Download:

You are welcomed to download the following two apps that will be discussed and demonstrated during the talk. They are available in both the App Store and Google Play.

– Small Wonders for Families

– Animal Antics for Families. https://www.gse.harvard.edu/apps/early-literacy