Carl Heath, The internet of things in learning environments
Carl Heath is senior researcher at RISE Interactive in Gothenburg Sweden. Focusing on research and development projects regarding ICT and learning and learning perspectives.
FILMED IN GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN 2018
EGA-TALKS is produced by Erik Giudice Architects: interviews with experts in the field of architecture, urbanism and related areas. EGA Talks is part of EGAs ongoing cross disciplinary research aiming to envision a sustainable future
The internet of things in learning environments
We have been in physical environments to understand and share knowledge all throughout human history basically. Since we invented fire we have sat down in a space and we have communicated knowledge between each other. Over time these spaces have become more and more facilitated and be more specifically designed to do different things.
When it comes to sharing spaces for knowledge it could be anything from a school to a conference environment. What we’ve seen over the past 10-20 years is the emergence of a new kind of layer going on top of our physical space. That is the processes of digitization, where individuals and organizations have started to utilize technologies in the context of knowledge.
So obviously, the whole of the internet has meant we negotiate knowledge differently in groups and in society at large. That also changes how we actually use a physical space.
From the very simple things, like desk design. When we had big stationary computers, desks were a common safety to support that. Now obviously they are looking very different.
What’s happening now as technology evolves over time is that we start to see new emerging practices, where we need to renegotiate our idea of what the physical space is, in the context of digitization.
So what I mean by that is that for example when it comes to knowledge and understanding knowledge one thing that digitization implies is that data becomes all the more important. Actually knowing what goes on in a given process becomes valuable as an output and that goes for knowledge spaces as well.
So for example if we take an educational environment or a conference environment or a boardroom environment. The decision-making that goes on in those places or the test that is made. That’s crucial core business for those specific practices. Then obviously knowing more about how that process is, in that physical space becomes more important.
What we see now is the emergence of being able to use, for example the revolutionary approaches in ”Internet of Things”. To see how we can better understand what goes on in a place through data gathering and raising the level or the frequency of our data accumulation.
For example, we all know that if somebody writes a tests or if we are sitting in a boardroom environment and somebody outside of the room starts drilling with a big drill. With a lot of noise. That will seriously implicate our possibilities to actually learn or communicate anything in that room.That also goes for a very low intermittent sound, that I might not be aware of but that actually hinders me and my cognition in that particular moment.
For example the road outside of the window might suddenly have raised noise levels at a particular moment in time. What would happen if we actually start to understand that in a room and we can get feedback from the room. That tells us about our physical affordances in real time. For a teacher that might mean that you wouldn’t have the test when there’s a raised noise level on the street outside. For the board room environment you might change the color of the light to support a different kind of conversation.
There’s all these kinds of things that are starting to emerge. Where the sort of layer of digitization going over the physical space starts to shift what we actually do and how we do things in that space. That is a very exciting shift. There’s these physical spaces and we take them so much for granted.
Re-framing how we do things, can sometimes be a bit tricky and hard. Placing ourselves in this new position of understanding and looking. What does it mean when a person coming into a room has technology that changes the affordances of that room? What does it mean when an organization builds a system in a building that changes how we actually work in that space? What does it mean when we build the spaces? What does this mean, when it comes to data and data-sharing in a space?
Who should understand what goes on in the space? Is the energy levels only relevant for the people working in the building or should the actual user in the building have some kind of other knowledge brought out from that data?
How do we secure data in buildings? That becomes a really big tricky question. So there’s all these kinds of things happening, when we suddenly perceive data being a part of the ecosystem of learning and knowledge creation in a room. That journey we’ve just started on. There’s a lot to be understood and explored in the future to come.