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title: WHAT DOES THE LEARNING LAB DO?

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# WHAT DOES THE LEARNING LAB DO?

We help Harvard's faculty and students develop and express ideas in new and unconventional ways. The bulk of our projects fall into one of these 3 categories:

1. designing and supporting unconventional assignments in Harvard undergraduate courses (we help undergrads learn to make stuff)
2. helping faculty and graduate students develop their skills at communicating their research in new ways (we help PhD students and Faculty make stuff)
3. creating new learning tools and resources for Harvard courses (we make the stuff) 

In each of these zones, we are committed to a deep integration of the "technical" tools and the subject matter. The model is essentially the academic writing program, where students don't just learn to write, they write to learn. They learn THROUGH writing. And we want to make sure that the assignments we support don't just offer students an at-best-entertaining and at-worst-distracting "break" from a conventional exam or paper. We want to make sure that whatever they do is a BETTER way of developing and communicating their knowledge about the course's subject matter than whatever we're replacing.

# WHAT DOES THE ASSISTANT DIRECTOR DO?

There are three big chunks of the Assistant Director Role.

1. working with the whole team to consult with faculty, designing assignments and activities with them and then building and testing them with the LL staff.
2. handling the administrative and managerial load for the Media and Design Fellows (MDF) program.
3. working as an "individual contributor" in your chosen tools, which involves building things yourself and teaching others to build them


# WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE? 

Here are some clips that give you a sense of what the day-to-day feeling of the LL is. For more, check out [our Flickr page](https://www.flickr.com/photos/boklearninglab).

## PROTOTYPING & TESTING

Here's what testing and exploration looks like. First, an experiment for a course on the era of phone video, observation and surveillance.

<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/508514847?h=0c09e98c66&title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/508514847">VES62m -- Learning Lab activity test</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/derekbokcenter">Learning Lab</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>

And an example of a faculty-driven experiment in artistic collaboration:

<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/508587392?h=6047326565&title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/508587392">Cello Tap BTS</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/derekbokcenter">Learning Lab</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>


## FACULTY AND GRAD STUDENT ACADEMIC COMMUNICATION

Here's a Harvard Horizons student practicing in our Studio:

<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/boklearninglab/51383398775/" title="20200225_001_HHPractice_TC_C300a_Still01"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51383398775_f54e58a518_h.jpg" alt="20200225_001_HHPractice_TC_C300a_Still01"></a>

and here's a Harvard Horizons student delivering a talk in Sanders Theater.

<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/508580710?h=c19fbdee4c&title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/508580710">Victoria&rsquo;s Hwang&rsquo;s final presentation -- Harvard Horizons 2019</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/derekbokcenter">Learning Lab</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>

## STUDENT ASSIGNMENT SUPPORT

Here's a little "assignment trailer" for an assignment we support that has students use Cinema 4D, Blender or Unity to create 3D virtual museums.

<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/161467402?h=0db829a497&title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/161467402">Pyramid Schemes Assignment Trailer</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/derekbokcenter">Learning Lab</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>


## MDF PROJECTS

And here are a couple of nice articles on MDF projects, one on [podcasting in Biology courses](https://bokcenter.harvard.edu/news/science-through-story-podcasts-oeb50) and one on [virtual labs for OEB too](https://bokcenter.harvard.edu/news/lab-3d-success-virtual-labs-oeb-126). And [here is a toolkit for and Engineering & Music course](https://gened1080.bok.tools/math.html) with things like [Observables on logarithms](https://observablehq.com/@hzsteinberg/logarithms).
