Learning Creative Learning

You might be familiar with Mitch Resnick, one of the co-creators of the Scratch programming language, and a professor at the M.I.T. Media Lab.  I’ve talked about teaching kids how to program quite a bit on this blog, and featured a T.E.D. talk presented by Mitch Resnick on this topic in one of my posts.  You can find out more about Dr. Resnick and his numerous accomplishments here.

Dr. Resnick – along with two of his colleagues, Natalie Rusk and Philipp Schmidt – is giving all of us a unique opportunity beginning tomorrow, March 18th, 2014.  They are presenting a 6-week course for free called, “Learning Creative Learning.”  The target students for this course are educators, designers, and researchers.  Here is a brief summary of the course from their website: “LCL will focus on key aspects of the Media Lab approach to learning: Projects, Peers, Passion, and Play. We invite you to apply these ideas to your own teaching and learning experiences. Together, we can reimagine and reinvent education.”

There will be online sessions every Tuesday from 1-2 PM EST, but these sessions will be recorded for those of us who can’t attend.  You can take a look at the syllabus for the course here, although they do give the disclaimer that it is a work in progress. Discussion forums have been set up, and there is an FAQ section.

You do not have to register for the course to be involved, although you can provide an e-mail address to receive updates.  As I mentioned earlier, the course is free.  You will receive no certification for participating, so getting involved is based purely on your intrinsic motivation to learn from some distinguished educators at a top-rated university.

This is the 2nd year for the course to be offered in this format, but it’s still a work-in-progress.  As Dr. Resnick says, “The best learning experiences happen when you take risks and try new things and learn from your mistakes.”

For those of you who choose to join the class, I hope to see you in the discussion forums or following @medialabcourse on Twitter!  It should be an interesting adventure!