Institute for Research on Learning
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

The Institute for Research on Learning (IRL) in
Palo Alto Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city was estab ...
,
California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...
was co-founded by
John Seely Brown John Seely Brown (born 1940), also known as "JSB", is an American researcher who specializes in organizational studies with a particular bend towards the organizational implications of computer-supported activities. Brown served as Director of Xer ...
, then chief research scientist at the
Palo Alto Research Center PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, the company was originally a division of Xero ...
, and James Greeno, Professor of Education at
Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
, with the support of David Kearns, CEO of Xerox Corporation in 1986 through a grant from the Xerox Foundation. It operated from 1986 to 2000 as an independent cross-disciplinary
think tank A think tank, or policy institute, is a research institute that performs research and advocacy concerning topics such as social policy, political strategy, economics, military, technology, and culture. Most think tanks are non-governmenta ...
with a mission to study learning in all its forms and sites.
George Pake George E. Pake (April 1, 1924 – March 4, 2004) was a physicist and research executive primarily known for helping founded Xerox PARC. Early life Pake was raised in Kent, Ohio. His father was an English instructor at Kent State Universi ...
, who founded Xerox Palo Alto Research Corporation in 1970 became IRL's first director and moved with the institute first to Hanover Street, Palo Alto and then to Willow Place, Menlo Park. Greeno was Associate Director of IRL 1987-1991 and Acting Director for a few months during 1991. From 1992 to 1999 Peter Henschel was Executive Director. IRL was a nonprofit research organization that looked at learning in schools, workplaces, and informal settings, using collaborative, multidisciplinary teams. Research questions were based in real-world problems and settings defined in partnership with people in schools and workplaces who championed these activities. The institute had a significant impact on education and knowledge management (among many other fields) not only in the US but globally through the development of the concept of a
community of practice A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who "share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly". The concept was first proposed by cognitive anthropologist Jean Lave and educat ...
.


Social Approach to Learning

The first group of researchers was recruited from Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, and from Xerox PARC, in disciplines including anthropology, computer science, education, psychology, and linguistics. The institute developed its unique social approach to learning, expressed in the Seven Principles of Learning and in the conception of communities-of-practice. Its innovative view of learning, the use of qualitative methods and the coupling of research with design were path breaking in its time, inspired an enthusiastic following and have enriched organizational and educational discourses to this day.


IRL's Seven Principles of Learning

#Learning is fundamentally social. #Knowledge is integrated in the life of communities. #Learning is an act of membership. #Knowing depends on engagement in practice. #Engagement is inseparable from empowerment. #“Failure to Learn” is the normal result of exclusion from participation. #We already have a society of lifelong learners.


IRL’s Core Capabilities

IRL defined its core capabilities as: * Learning to see Learning * Design for Learning * Learning and Work Design * Learning, Identity and Diversity IRL's projects were grouped into research settings: ;Research of Learning in the Classroom: *Funding from Education Grants. (NSF, Hearst Foundation and others) *Researchers: Shelley Goldman, Ted Kahn, Jim Greeno, Jennifer Knudsen, Ray McDermott, Angela Booker, Karen Cole, Ralph Manak, Judit Moschkovich, Roy Pea, Tina Syer, and more. *Partners and clients: NSF, US Dept. of Education, Hearst Foundation, Spencer Foundation, Stanford University, Middle Schools in the Bay Area and more. *Research focused on Learning in the K 8- 12 classroom, with special emphasis on mathematics as the greatest hurdle to school success. Researchers developed alternatives to, and support of, traditional math modules by embedding mathematical topics in practical tasks (e.g. design of a building) executed in groups and with computers. ;Research on Learning in the Workplace: * Financed through corporate sponsorship. * Research projects for corporate clients. Research topics were co-developed with the corporate clients to have academic and corporate relevance. Results were shared with the client and a network of affiliates in the form of articles, reports and presentations. * Researchers: Libby Bishop, Melissa Cefkin, William Clancey, Chris Darrouzet, Gitte Jordan, Ted Kahn, Charlotte Linde, Patricia Sachs, Susan Stucky, Eric Vinkhuyzen, Etienne Wenger, Marilyn and Jack Whalen, Helga Wild, and more. * Partners and clients: e.g.
Xerox Corporation Xerox Holdings Corporation (; also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (having moved from Sta ...
,
State Farm State Farm Insurance is a large group of mutual insurance companies throughout the United States with corporate headquarters in Bloomington, Illinois. Overview State Farm is the largest property and casualty insurance provider, and the la ...
Insurance,
Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...
,
Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...
,
Nynex NYNEX Corporation was an American telephone company that served five states of New England (Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont) as well as most of the state of New York from January 1, 1984 to August 14, 1997. History ...
,
Steelcase Steelcase Inc. is an American manufacturer of furniture, casegoods, seating, and space solutions for offices, hospitals, classrooms, and residential interiors. It is headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA. History Originally known as Th ...
,
Hermann Miller Hermann or Herrmann may refer to: * Hermann (name), list of people with this name * Arminius, chieftain of the Germanic Cherusci tribe in the 1st century, known as Hermann in the German language * Éditions Hermann, French publisher * Hermann, Mis ...
,
IDEO IDEO () is a design and consulting firm with offices in the U.S., England, Germany, Japan, and China. It was founded in Palo Alto, California, in 1991. The company's 700 staff uses a design thinking approach to design products, services, enviro ...
,
Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
, and more. ;Research Initiative on Learning, Identity and Diversity: * Researchers: Penny Eckert, Charlotte Linde, working on social identity and memory through sociolinguistic analysis and the analysis of an organization's (his)tories.


History and Philosophy of IRL

The chief scientist at
Palo Alto Research Center PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, the company was originally a division of Xero ...
(PARC), John Seely Brown, psychologist by training, saw the computer revolution open up the possibility of dramatic changes in learning. He gained the support of David Kearns, CEO of Xerox Corporation, who encouraged the Xerox Foundation to grant a substantial amount of money to the creation of an institution to study learning and innovation in the context of the use of computers. The institute was to operate as an independent entity, even though it was incubated with the knowledge and the assistance of key people from Xerox PARC. It gradually weaned itself from dependence on the grant and earned its keep by the fruits of its research. The institute was named Institute for Research on Learning (IRL) and founded in 1988. Its first director was George Pake, a physicist from PARC. Its staff was composed of an inter-disciplinary group of researchers: recruited in part from PARC and from Stanford and UC Berkeley. Researchers came from the disciplines of education, linguistics, anthropology, computer science, and psychology. Of particular note, James G. Greeno, a senior educational psychologist, worked to define themes and guide research projects throughout IRL's history. This first generation of researchers developed the vision and methodology for the institute. They were inspired by anthropology's conception of learning as a social and cultural phenomenon and inspired by books like “Situated Learning” (Co-authors Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger were members of the institute).Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. New York: Cambridge University Press. The institute adopted
ethnography Ethnography (from Greek ''ethnos'' "folk, people, nation" and ''grapho'' "I write") is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject o ...
as its main research method, a factor that distinguished it in major ways from other thinktanks. Under this influence the initial image of learning as an individual's interaction with knowledge mediated possibly by computational tools made way for a vision of learning as apprenticeship. In apprenticeship the knowledge content could not be isolated from the learner's social status in a socio-cultural field: apprentices had to be received into a community – a guild, profession or team – and migrated within this group from the periphery towards greater and greater participation in the social and professional activities. The learning process was seen to be substantially one of interaction with the members of one's own community or group first and with related social groups and networks secondarily. From gaining access to a practice to learning how it is carried out by this group, to collaborating with peers on a shared task or agenda, and finally socializing others as an established member – all these were aspects of learning but also evidence of transformations of identity. They establish both the position of the learner and the content of what is to be learned as part of a social practice shaped by and shaping a material and institutional environment. IRL's social perspective opened up areas of learning where none had been suspected before. Learning was found to be present not just in schools and training camps, but also in clubs, midwifery, prisons, neighborhoods, in highly formalized as well as highly informal settings. In traditional schools and workplaces, social interaction was often frowned upon as an interruption of work proper. It was the institute's conviction and commitment to convince the public otherwise. The school part of the institute took on the key gatekeeper in Middle School, mathematics, and created social and practical learning substitutes for the individualized learning tasks in the school curriculum. For instance, instead of teaching fractions in the traditional manner through a series of manipulations of numbers, they developed collaborative design exercises that involved fractions in a practical context – designing a room layout and furniture – that taught students the relevance of fractions in maintaining proportions and gave them a grounded understanding as well as a practical use. The analogous research on the industry side consisted in ethnographic projects in organizations to uncover social forms of learning inside the workplace and to enhance what benefits they could bring to the corporation. These enhancements could relate to the spatial and institutional aspects of work: Several large projects were dedicated to designing work processes, strategies and workplaces in support of the social aspects of work. They could focus on furniture and technology, on organizational processes or on team building, orientation and training. What all had in common was the theoretical position of the institute – to treat a corporation as a social entity composed of individuals and communities formed around key practices or competencies. Communities-of-Practice were seen as building blocks for learning and identity formation and as holders of organizational know-how. During its twelve years of pioneering research, IRL had developed and disseminated many radical advances in social and cognitive science: the use of systematic ethnographic methods to study organizations, the social approach to learning, research projects with corporate clients, emphasis on communities and social networks as instrumental for innovation and organizational knowledge, and the awareness of the informal aspects of an organization. Furthermore, as venue for broad dissemination, in 1989, John Seely Brown and Roy Pea co-founded The Cambridge University Press book series ''Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive, and Computational Perspectives'' - in over 30 years, close to 50 book titles were published to illuminate and contribute to research scholarship pursuant to the core themes and advances wrought by IRL and its knowledge networks. Throughout those twelve years the institute managed to keep itself afloat through national and other grants and specialized corporate projects. It hired researchers, developed a network of affiliates and corporate sponsors, conducted industry retreats, delivered reports and presentations, and contributed to journals and conferences. In 2000, as the dotcom bubble was bursting, funding for learning research projects became hard to come by. After the institute lost a major project at the end of its fiscal year, the decision was made to cease operations. A number of key educational projects and research staff were transferred into WestEd, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research, development, and service agency which also worked with education and other communities throughout the United States and abroad. After the institute closed, staff members and researchers dispersed, some back to universities, some to other research institutions such as WestEd noted above and to
NASA Ames The Ames Research Center (ARC), also known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1939 as the second National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) laborat ...
. Others returned to the corporate sector or made their way newly into the corporate world to work in the emerging field of business anthropology or Ethnographic practice in corporations.


IRL Projects and Researchers (from Annual Reports)


Bibliography

*Allen, C. L., Linde, C., Pea, R. D., de Vet, J., & de Vogel, R. (1992). The Picasso Project on Multimedia Communications: Final Report. Technical Report, Institute for Research on Learning. Palo Alto, CA (139pp) *Clancey, W. J., Sachs, P., Sierhuis, M., and van Hoof, R. 1998. Brahms: Simulating practice for work systems design,'' Int. J. Computer-Human Studies'', 49, 831-865. *Clancey, W. J. 1997. ''Situated Cognition: On Human Knowledge and Computer Representations''. New York: Cambridge University Press. *Clancey, W. J. 2006. Observation of work practices in natural settings. In A. Ericsson, N. Charness, P. Feltovich, and R. Hoffman (eds.), ''Cambridge Handbook on Expertise and Expert Performance''. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 127–145. *Clancey, W. J. 2008. Scientific antecedents of situated cognition. In P. Robbins and M. Aydede (eds.), ''Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition''. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 11–34. *Mills, M. I., & Pea, R. D. (1989). Mind and media in dialog: Issues in multimedia composition. In K. Hooper & S. Ambron (Eds.), Full-Spectrum Learning (pp. 14-37). Cupertino, CA: Apple Computer, Inc. *Pea, R.D. (1991, July). Learning through multimedia. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 11(4), 58-66. *Pea, R. D. (1992). Augmenting the discourse of learning with computer-based learning environments. In E. de Corte, M. Linn, & L. Verschaffel (Eds.), Computer-based learning environments and problem-solving (NATO Series, subseries F: Computer and System Sciences). New York: Springer-Verlag GmbH (pp. 313-343). *Pea, R. D. (1993). Practices of distributed intelligence and designs for education. In G. Salomon (Ed.). Distributed cognitions (pp. 47-87). New York: Cambridge University Press.
irst appeared as IRL Technical Report An infrared search and track (IRST) system (sometimes known as infrared sighting and tracking) is a method for detecting and tracking objects which give off infrared radiation, such as the infrared signatures of jet aircraft and helicopters. ...
*Pea, R. D. (1993). Learning scientific concepts through material and social activities: Conversational analysis meets conceptual change. Educational Psychologist, 28(3), 265-277. *Pea, R. D. (1994). Seeing what we build together: Distributed multimedia learning environments for transformative communications. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 3(3), 285-299. *Pea, R.D., Boyle, E., and de Vogel, R. (1990). Design spaces for multimedia composing tools. In B. Bowen (Ed.), Designing for learning (pp. 37-42). Cupertino, CA: Apple Computer Press. *Roschelle, J., Pea, R. D., & Sipusic, M. (1989, April). Design of a tool for video analysis. Proceedings of ACM/SIGCHI Workshop on Video as a Research and Design Tool, MIT, Cambridge MA. *Roschelle, J., Pea, R. D., & Trigg, R. (1990). VideoNoter: A tool for exploratory video analysis. Institute for Research on Learning, Technical Report No. 17. Palo Alto, CA. *Stucky, S., 1992. Technology in support of organizational learning. In C. Zucchermaglio, Bagnara, S., and Stucky, S. (eds.), ''Organizational Learning and Technological Change.'' NATO Advanced Science Institute Series. Springer -Verlag GmbH & KG, Berlin. *Stucky, S., Cefkin, M., Rankin, Y., Shaw B., and J. Thomas. 2011. Dynamics of Value Co-Creation in Complex IT Engagements. '' Information systems and e-business management'', 9. *Stucky, S., Kieliszewski, C. and L.Anderson. 2014. A Case Study: Designing the client experience for Discovery using Big Data. In Ahram, T., Karwowski, W., and T. Marek (eds.), ''Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics AHFE 2014'', Kraków, Poland July 19–23.


References

{{Authority control Palo Alto, California Research institutes established in 1986 Xerox Think tanks based in the United States 1986 establishments in California 2000 disestablishments in California