What’s been the most powerful learning experience that you've had? Dr. Margaret Honey has helped build remarkable learning experiences–starting with the television show, The Voyage of the Mimi, through her work at the New York Hall of Sciences and most recently with the Scratch Foundation. Through it all, she’s held fast to several principles, starting with: Never fake it. And center activity around children’s curiosity not around rubrics or assessments. In this episode, Margaret shares with Jeremy and Betsy the triumphs, challenges and hard-won lessons learned of building memorable experiential learning environments–along with what changes in an AI-saturated world. (And, we also learn why actor Ben Affleck knows so much about humpback whales!)

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• The Voyage of the Mimi (with Ben Affleck) was a 13-episode television program created in the mid 1980s. (Here’s episode 1.) A crew of the ship, Mimi, explored the ocean, to carry out a census of humpback whales. In The Second Voyage of the Mimi, archaeologists searched for a lost Mayan city.

• Here’s a video short on the Connected Worlds exhibit at the New York Hall of Science. (Better: Check out the exhibit at the museum!)

• Scratch, a free, nonprofit coding community and environment for children, is supported by the Scratch Foundation. (Start here if you’re considering a family membership; here if you’re an educator.)

• Xperiential, a collaboration between Pixar and Khan Academy, is a project-based learning approach aimed at inspiring students to explore careers through storytelling and design.

• Jeanne Bamberger’s 1995 book, The Mind behind the Musical Ear, explores how children develop “musical intelligence.”

• Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways, by Sarah Stein Greenberg (2021) includes both stories and innovative exercises to build creative leadership.

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History is chock full of new technologies developed with good intentions. But if we’ve learned anything over the past few decades, it’s that doing research and designing products has layers of complexity. It isn’t enough to just build tech for others – we have to build it in close partnership and community with those who will use it. In this episode of Future Fluent, Betsy and Jeremy talk with Dr. Elvira Salazar, a life-long educator, passionate devotee of STEM education and NASA, and now the Director of Online Learning & Technology for Latinos for Education. They’ll talk about what the AI community gets right – and gets wrong – in the rush to build the next great thing.

Learn more!

• To explore more of Dr. Salazar’s work, a great place to start is the Latinos for Education website.

• She also contributed this piece, “Learnings from the Front Lines on Redefining Leadership for the Age of AI,” to EdSurge.

• Dr. Salazar described the work of CLEAR, or the Center for Leadership Equity and Research. You can explore the groups work as well as its AI initiative at Clearvoz.com

• This story, “AI Leaves Some Students Lost in Translation,” explores in more detail some of the promise and challenges of AI development for the Latino community. (You can also try out the Playlab app developed by the group, “Elevating your Speaking,” a tool that parents can use to support their students’ language development skills, here.)

• Stanford University professor, Dr. Sanmi Koyejo, discusses his white paper about how AI is leaving non-English speakers behind here. The full report from Dr. Koyejo and his team is here: “Mind the (Language) Gap: Mapping the Challenges of LLM Development in Low-Resource Language Contexts.”

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Why are the “myths” about how we learn sometimes more powerful than what research has delivered? In this episode of Future Fluent, Jeremy and Betsy interview Dr. Melina Uncapher, a neuroscience researcher and learning science practitioner who has spent her professional life trying to help educators and researchers work together. They plunge into one of the great myths of learning–that we have different “styles” of learning–and then ask the question: Can AI make it possible to weave learning science into the classroom? Betsy puts a challenge to Melina.

Learn more! Here’s where you can explore some of the ideas around learning science and AI that we discussed with Dr. Melina Uncapher.

• “Strategic Surprise and the Future of Educational R&D” is an openly available white paper coauthored by Drs. Melina Uncapher and Jeremy Roschelle. The core point: Generative AI is catalyzing rapid shifts in learning practices that far outpace how we have traditionally responded to changes. This paper proposes to re-architect education R&D to be more agile, responsive, and, hopefully to create breakthrough potential.
• Designed for Brilliance is a workbook resource for teachers on how to apply learning science by Dr. Uncapher. At the moment, it’s available as a downloadable PDF. Check out Chapter 2: The top 7 Neuromyths, Busted.
• On the broad topic of using evidence-based practices in the classroom, take a look at the Accelerate, Transform Scale Hub launched recently by Digital Promise and SRI. Background details here.
• Why good ideas stall in education – an opinion piece by Dr. Uncapher and Nat Kendall-Taylor in the 74Million.
• AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t and How to Tell the Difference, by computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, from Princeton University Press, is well-worth a read.
• And if it all seems like a bit too much, check out the Pixar movie, Inside Out, which, as Melina says, puts the principles of learning science into animation!

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