Note: This transcript has been edited and does not represent a word-for-word account of the podcast audio.
In this episode of the Arts Management and Technology Lab, Hales Wilson speaks with Marti Louw, design-based researcher and co-director of Learning Sciences for Innovators, about the intersection of learning sciences, educational technology, and human-centered design. Drawing on her background in media, museums, and interaction design, Marti discusses how interdisciplinary approaches shape learning experiences, the challenges of scaling EdTech globally, and the importance of cultural relevance in educational innovation. She also reflects on the emerging role of AI in education, emphasizing the need for careful, research-driven implementation to ensure equitable and meaningful learning outcomes.
Show Notes
Transcript
Marti Louw
I think there's just a lot of complexities to get worked out in the use of AI and education, and we're seeing sort of small, bright spots of success in limited ways, but a wholesale kind of translation of curriculums and pushing through entire populations of students through AI-generated curriculum is probably not where we're at yet.
Hales Wilson
Welcome to another episode of Tech in the Arts, the podcast series from the Arts Management and Technology Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University. My name is Hales Wilson, the lead researcher at AMT Lab. Today I'm joined by a design-based researcher and co-director of the Learning Sciences for Innovators, Marti Louw.
She's a faculty member in the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where she directs the Learning Media Design Center. She also serves as the Assistant Dean of Curriculum for the Integrative Design Arts & Technology (IDeATe) network, teaches in the Master's of Educational Technology and Applied Learning Sciences (METALS), and undergraduate IDeATe Design for Learning minor programs.
While there is much to gain in this conversation about all that she does today, we'll be focusing on her work with the Learning Sciences for Innovators Program. It is designed to bridge the gap between academic research and research in the learning sciences and a practical need for the EdTech industry, specifically within the African context.
The program’s primary goal is to help growth-stage companies and EdTech entrepreneurs refine and scale their products using evidence-based methods by applying human-centered design and data-driven analysis. LSFI aims to ensure that educational technologies are not disengaging, also demonstrably effective for learners.
So, before we get into the weeds of the Learning Sciences for Innovators program. Could you go into a little bit how your background as a designer may influence the way you think about how people learn?
Marti Louw
I don't come from an educational research or a traditional kind of learning sciences background. Both a lot of sort of practical experience that kind of drove me towards educational research and design. And so I spent the first, probably, 10 years of my life right after college in television, and film, and documentary. And my first job out of college actually was a youth and families program at the Science Museum of Minnesota.
And while I was working there, Newton's Apple, which is a local public television program, came in and was filming the assembly of a dinosaur there. And I got really excited 'cause I'd been doing film studies and work in college and got interested in this idea of children's television and documentaries, and basically, television is an educational medium, which sort of started this trajectory.
I ended up working for about five years in New York for a Japanese production. I speak Japanese pretty fluently in news and television and documentary, and then I moved up to Boston and started working for a production company there that did a combination of both broadcast as well as museum exhibit design, particularly in that case, interactive media in the early days of interactivity with disc-laser space, but it was kind of a form of early interactivity and ended up working at WGBH in the science unit on the NOVA program.
And around that time, the internet started emerging as a companion to the broadcast. That became this really interesting medium for games and ancillary material, and putting out resources for teachers and educators, and that was starting to shape my interest. It was at that point I actually decided to come back to school and was really interested in interactive media as both for education and engagement.
That's when it came to CMU. I did a Master's in our interaction design program here at the School of Design, and during that work, I became really interested in learning and how do we design for it. And I subsequently went over to the University of Pittsburgh to the Learning Research and Development Center and worked for about 10 years at the Center for Learning and Out of School Environments with Dr. Kevin Crowley, and started writing grants and really building a research base to inform the design of learning experiences.
That's a long way of answering your question— I come from a very practice and a design-based approach to learning, and I see a lot of value to learning research, but trying to figure out ways to take what we know from educational research and the theory-base, and let it inform, but not weigh down the design process.
Because I think there's always this tension in the creation, really, even if it's online courseware or educational media or exhibit designs or play-based kind of engagements, which is how do we choose the learning goals, and do they come first? Do we backwards design them, or do we think first about the human experience and the storytelling and the narrative, and let those lead lead our way into the specific learning goals. And different people will argue in different ways. Because of my training and background, I started a little bit more open-ended and a little bit less focused on the learning outcomes initially, and more focused on the narrative. So I would say that's probably one of the ways in which my background shapes how I think about research.
Hales Wilson
Thank you. I didn't realize how extended your background with working specifically in organizations and institutions like museums are. So that kind of leads me to my next question. Yeah, so the Learning Science for Innovators program seems like a natural extension of much of the work you do with learning in science and museums.
Could you talk a little bit about your journey, specifically through EdTech, and how the Innovators Program pulls from both your human-computer interaction and media background?
Marti Louw
So the Learning Science for Innovators program that you described earlier is really building on a strength in Carnegie Mellon in education and learning with computational approaches to really trying to understand both the human mind, expertise and how do we support robust kinds of learning outcomes using data and evidence.
And so CMU has been for a long time pioneering complex kinds of computer systems and using data, and really exploring how to support learning with technology. We have learning sciences, it's not a department, but it's situated within the Human Computer Interaction Institute the (HCII) which brings a lot of these concerns for the human in the loop, and usability and psychology, human factors, which adds these other kinds of fields blend because learning is such a complex human phenomena. It's embodied, it's cognitive, it's social, and affective. And so it is truly, truly interdisciplinary.
And so I think CMU and HCII are really well-positioned to think about how to bring technology to under-resourced learning kind of environments. So one of the challenges we see both here in the US and in many countries, including many countries in Africa, is just first, a lack of trained instructor. In many parts of the world, having enough teachers and educators and structures in place to meet the demands and needs of young populations, and in these environments where they're low resource in terms of spaces and learning materials and there's not yet enough trained instructors—what is the role technology can play?
What I really like about this program is that it's not us coming to tell or do the technology. There's so many kinds of global technologies that get pushed into emerging economies. One intent of this program is to really work with local entrepreneurs who know their cultures, they know their school districts, they know their schooling systems, they know their national curricula, they know all, all the nuances of these very complex countries that often have multiple kinds of home languages, very different cultures, different religions, and creating learning materials that are culturally relevant is I think, really difficult for outsiders to do.
So our goal is to go in and work with EdTech incubators or hubs that bring together every year a cohort of 12 companies that have been selected as growth-stage and really ready to scale. And we share aspects of our METALS curriculum, so our Masters of Educational Technology and Applied Learning Sciences, and aspects of our HCII curriculum and really work with these entrepreneurs and their teams to upskill and try to help create and improve their products so they can achieve both their commercial as well as educational goals, and make sure that their products are continued to improve learning.
Hales Wilson
I appreciate you bringing up that point about some of the disparities that are happening in education just overall, and that kind of bleeds me into my next question. One of the interests that I have, especially after taking our Technologies Transforming the Arts class, that's like our work, bridge in the arts management world. I really got into this interest of AI and how it's impacting like this K through 12 education. And I know that one of the courses offered now is AI and education from foundations to innovations, which provides a full overview of how AI works from basic machine learning concepts to generative AI and teaches us how to apply these tools to design, build, and improve educational technology and learning experiences. What responsibility do you feel that designers and developers have when building AI systems that impact real people's opportunities (for outcomes) or outcomes?
Marti Louw
Without being a technology luddite, I think one has to be really, really careful about when and how and why to integrate AI mechanisms and AI layers into educational technology, and it is one of the things that we're struggling with.
There's obviously a rush to, especially if you're an entrepreneur, to layer in an AI component. I think it's especially challenging when we think about doing the work and the use of these models in contexts, like on the continent where these models have not been trained with appropriate data; there's not a lot of cultural relevance.
It's kind of a normalization and a reduction of culture in a way that we're involving these kids in. On the one hand, you can see ready access to information that's been so difficult to access is a wonderful thing. But how do we check that, the accuracy of it, the accountability of it. I think there's just a lot of complexities to get worked out in the use of AI in education and we're seeing sort of small, bright spots of success in limited ways, but wholesale kind of translation of curriculums and pushing through entire populations of students through AI-generated curriculum is probably not where we're at yet.
And so I think it's very much in an exploratory stage and trying to understand what's working and spending the time to research and understand what's positively and what's also negatively impacting learners and not disenfranchising them, especially at the margins, and women or young girls, as we rush forward to just adopt AI.
Hales Wilson
Thank you for that cause I know sometimes when we have an AI discussion, especially in different courses and people coming in, it's like a situation where like AI, yes, it's of the future. We better just get on board with it before it passes us by. But I appreciate you bringing in that point of like having to like, okay, but let's kind of assess the situations where it's at now and trying to almost, I guess, meet people where they're at before pushing this new concept and technology onto them
Marti Louw
Things can be designed well and not well, and research is starting to come out that used inappropriately AI can cognitively stunt intellectual development, and shut down questioning and exploration and inquiry and a lot of things we know about how the human mind works.
And so, you know, it’s being really, really careful before we deploy at scale. And over time is important and the responsibility of those of us not just in EdTech research, but the people who are pushing it out into the world.
Hales Wilson
On that, I kind of want to move, as I said, the technology's not my area of expertise, truly. So I kind of wanna move into maybe some of the more management aspects, specifically like the donor ecosystems that went into this project.
But some additional partners include the Co-creation Hub, Adventures, Entry Labs, and Hive Colab. Are there any ways that partnerships have changed the direction of the program? Maybe, um, in who you serve, what you teach, or how you deliver it?
Marti Louw
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, from the get-go, this was positioned as knowledge co-creation and a participatory kind of process, so we’re working with hubs in each of the countries; and each of the hubs have different needs and things have emerged. So, for example, in Tanzania, their hub was really seeing a need to make sure that the fellows or the EdTech entrepreneurs were really adopting and valuing usability early on in the EdTech testing process, and making sure that you were testing not just with private schools, but also public schools and with learners with different kinds of abilities and learning kinds of resources. So with them we've developed a kind of usability testbed model as a way to practice how do you do rapid and effective usability testing, and use that feedback in your development cycle; and making sure that your taking the temperature of your designs with learners at many points along the way.
And doing it in a way that's cost-effective and still allows you to move rapidly to market. That's an example. I guess you're asking with each of the countries—we were working in West Africa as well with Francophone speaking countries and so there's a lot around translation and making sure our materials are meeting the needs of folks who are Arabic speaking or French speaking, which of course means getting down in the weeds of what making examples and materials linguistically and culturally relevant— this is something that we work a lot with our partners there to improve the work.
Hales Wilson
And then with the sustainable EdTech program, you're managing, and with managing this major like international partnership, what has that experience taught you about scaling this like CMU-born idea into a global context while keeping like funding and management sustainable?
Marti Louw
I think the way I would answer that, and that's not just specific to this project, but in general one of the challenges, I think university-based projects face in big, large scale, center-level kinds of academic work and I think the university and the students and the people that end up working on the projects are so ambitious, and have so many ideas, and there's a constant kind of new and more and better instinct, because there's a lot of reflection.
And I think one of the challenges with these kinds of things is to keep them scoped; and to keep them manageable and not letting every new idea kind of drag the focus and get beyond what actually the resources of the team are. And so we're constantly having to rebalance and look at what are the priorities and what are the impacts, and trying to not do that based on intuition, but work with evaluation, both process as well as external evaluation to check on whether we are we really keeping our eyes on the prize and delivering on the things that matter most? And so I think that's really important— both resisting scope creep, not overpromising, and then having some sort of reflective evaluative process on what you're doing as a team, pretty periodically.
Hales Wilson
Thank you, and it actually kind of answered my second question about whether, when you're kind of cultivating this pitch or like this project of like helping build technology, are you more focused? And I think you mentioned this earlier on, this human-centered impact.
Marti Louw
To me, those things are so deeply entwined —that learner impact and human impact both have to be in first position. You know, you could just be showing cognitive outcomes. People, if they drill and skill on some sort of adaptive tutor they can increase their performance or they're doing better on a math unit or something, which is fantastic as a learning outcome.
But if you haven't thought about that learner and why they're showing up and what they're trying to accomplish, and if their day becomes just one long series of drills and skills on apps, you’re gonna lose the learner's motivation and interest, and their willingness to come participate in these experiences.
And so I think we have to think about the totality of the ecosystem, the learner experience and the learning ecosystem holistically, and the sort of multiplicity of kinds of learning experiences, the peer learning, the use of technology, the not-being on the tools and things like that—and really design for a whole learner experience.
So considering learning outcomes, human motivation and human aesthetics, you know, the stories and the theme of becoming ourselves more fully that education ultimately supports. All of those need to be wrapped into thinking about when, and how, and where to deploy what kinds of solutions, and with who and who's teaching them, a technology without a socializing aspect and a facilitator to help make it matter is destined to probably not succeed.
Hales Wilson
I think I wanna come out of the context of just learning science for innovators and move as your role as the assistant dean for IDeATe as well as Professor of Learning in Museums class. I wanted to ask the department, that's IDeATe and that kind of spans over like 15 different academic departments.
How do you (take) determine which learning objectives are core when you're building different fields, such as the Sonic Arts versus like intelligent environments?
Marti Louw
Yeah, super good question. So IDeATe just had its 10th anniversary and one of the things that we did kind of, well, I mean obviously whenever you start a program, you have to have program objectives and then you have to have minor objectives, and then you have course learning objectives. So there's a huge curricular mapping process involved behind making sure all of these things align.
But one of the things we did in IDeATe recently, we really revisited and thought about what are our program objective learning goals. Because when you're trying to pull together nine different minors that are in themselves interdisciplinary in the courses within them, how do we keep some sort of identity around what is the learning and what are the outcomes that we as a program are trying to share with students?
And so I don't have the learning objectives right in front of me, but there are things that our courses by nature have as being intentionally interdisciplinary. You're gonna be learning something from an art tradition, something with technology, something from a humanities kind of viewpoint, and you're going to use those to integrate and build something in the world.
There's always a project-based or a making component, but it doesn't always have to be physical. A lot of our classes do have a tangible, physical kind of computing aspect to them, others are more conceptual, but you're constantly forming and putting the ideas to work with other people in teams. So those are some of the core qualities of IDeATe courses.
We also want to make sure that we're hearing the histories and perspectives in fields of art, design and technology that aren't normally heard. So there's kind of a requirement that we bring those viewpoints outside the canon into the curriculum. Another thing that whenever we're looking for new courses, there's some sort of fundamentals, some basics that are kind of a requirement for them to be part of the IDeAte’s network. One is that there are no course prerequisites, they're open to all students on campus, and there is some kind of making involved — the ideas are not just gonna be written and talked about. They're gonna have to be implemented in some sort of creation of an object or an installation or an experience, an arts-based kind of experience.
And so that's been a way to frame and continue to try to build a program of courses in minors organized around things like. Intelligent Environments or Physical Computing or Soft Technologies, or in Design for Learning in the case of this minor we’ve been talking about.
Hales Wilson
You brought up, you know, some of them being like you're creating something tangible versus not. And I know in this specific class we're asking us students to test prototypes with actual users, such as our children's museum visitors. How does real-world feedback inform the way you iterate on your curriculum year over year?
Marti Louw
Real-world feedback from the museum or more from the students?
Hales Wilson
From the museum and those who are being observed and who are being used to test the prototypes.
Marti Louw
The public's participation in the students' product creation and their own learning? I guess I'll say I worked really hard over the year, first with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History Museum for probably four or five years, and the last couple of years I've been working very closely with the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. But developing one of these deeply engaged, experiential courses with a lot of access to the museum takes a lot of relationship building.
And maybe because I've worked with both of these institutions through research and grants. And have worked professionally with both the education and the exhibits teams- I understand how to start a conversation, knowing what their priorities are, knowing where their funding's coming from, knowing where they're struggling with in their professional development or areas of future programming that they're not quite sure how to handle.
Both these museums, for example, have really large, knotty kinds of problems to try and understand. How do you reinterpret a 19th-century museum in the age of the Anthropocene, right? How do you talk about nature? Do you still call it the Hall of Geology, or if your funders want to l call it the Hall of Energy—how do you handle these kinds disciplinary boundaries that are breaking down in the case of a natural history museum and becoming much more interdisciplinary. And then you walk into the politics of climate change, or not climate change, and the languages that you use around does evolution exist or not? So, those kinds of issues that a Natural History Museum works on, and finding a way to engage a group of young students who represent a current or future museum-going population, what they're thinking about, how they would think about engaging youth in their twenties, who are often a difficult group to bring into a museum. Similarly, with the Children's Museum, you know they're responding, as museums as civic institutions have to respond the discourses of the moment, the ideologies, the politics, the challenges, and the Children's Museum for the last couple of years has been looking a lot at empathy and kindness.
Is something that we actually need to teach, or do we need to sort of become platforms to engage in conversations in families and groups as publics. What do we mean by kindness? What does it mean to have empathy? How can we care for people that don't look like us or talk like us. Having a group of really talented CMU students work with them in a really integrated fashion about those ideas—There's just a lot of mutual benefit going on, and so I think that's been kind of the learning I've had over the years is not bringing a topic idea to them, but really sitting down with our museum partners and understanding where are the hardest things that they're working on and how could we have their investment of time and their opening up their doors and spaces to us provide this idea of mutual benefit and the things that surprisingly come out of it.
What’s kind of interesting and both museums got to this and not explicitly, is they used the engagement with us as professional development. Getting their staff members to talk about what they do, to present to the students, to review the students’ work, and to learn along with the readings and the things that the students are learning allows this kind of, what do you wanna call it … a learning community which let’s their staff have a moment on the stage to articulate what it is they know and do, and say that to a young group of professionals and open up the non-profit world. Getting into the museum world is not an open door; there's not a lot of jobs and it's not clear how to navigate where the entry is. So showing students what this nonprofit world looks like, I think there is a lot of benefit as well too.
Hales Wilson
Yeah, to your point about it being, building relationships is an important part of like, kind of cultivating this project and how the class is set up. And me being in the arts management world, we're hearing all the time about, you know, like having to network and your network is super important.
But what I really reflect about this class so far is the, like we are out there. In the world, you know, talking with Anne and now actually going there this weekend to do our observations. I think there's kind of something beautiful about that mutual benefit, you know, as far as we are getting kind of that real world experience, but also for instance, these things of like behavior and how truly environment can shape our understanding and how we can impact other people's understanding of learning is very beautiful, but also understanding that a lot of arts organizations, they don't have the funding to hire a group of researchers to come and help them design their exhibits. So it's great to have like this overlap. But, so yeah, I'm really enjoying the class and I'm very happy for this partnership that we're doing with the Children's Museum.
So I think we've covered a lot in our conversation from like your design and research background and how that's impacted your work in museums and then here at CMU, and both like the human-computer interaction and of course the learning science for innovators. Do you have any words of wisdom for people who are wanting to work in learning or technology or both?
Marti Louw
First of all, I'm always surprised that more students don't see education as a sector and as a professional area. And I think that maybe we need to do a little bit more work showing all the incredibly exciting opportunities you can get involved in when you know something about human learning and what delights and engages, and allows people to have to push on their own growth and development.
And so I guess one thought I have is, learning is core. Even if you work in corporations, there'll be professional development, upskilling and creating training materials that as you rise through the ranks of an institution, you might be having to help professionally develop your own team or yourself.
There's these arts-based organizations and museums and informal kinds of learning programs; there’s the kind of learning as a parent and parenting that you'll do, and then there's the whole field of education. And education is always in such dire need of talent and I would just love to see people who could find a love and a passion around teaching and learning and creating these resources and systems and projects we need. Really thinking about education and learning broadly as a place that you could make change in. It may not always pay the highest bucks, but will be super rewarding, and I doubt it's going away.
Hales Wilson
Thank you so much, Marti. This has been, I think our listeners from all over the arts and management and technology sphere will be able to pull a lot of really good and like pertinent information from this interview. So thank you so much for being here!
Dr. Brett Crawford
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