# ll-links-and-notes-20230510

## what is the Learning Lab?

<a data-flickr-embed="true" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/boklearninglab/38590371560/in/album-72157688059831350/" title="20180105_001_StudioBuilding_Photos_Still_046.jpg"><img src="https://live.staticflickr.com/4747/38590371560_fab0668c74_c.jpg" width="800" height="533" alt="20180105_001_StudioBuilding_Photos_Still_046.jpg"/></a>

As you'll read on our [website](https://bokcenter.harvard.edu/learning-lab), the Bok Center’s **Learning Lab** is an intergenerational team and a studio space built to support creative approaches to teaching and learning. We meet with faculty to consult with them about their objectives, then we design and prototype new assignments, activities and resources for their courses. The designing and testing is performed by our staff of
- 7 full-time employees
- 14 Media and Design Fellows (graduate students who work 10 hours per week to support teaching innovations in their home departments using the resources of the Learning Lab)
- 20 Learning Lab Undergraduate Fellows (LLUFs) who function as "play-testers" as we prototype (giving us feedback and new ideas), and then when the assignments and activities get launched during the term they frequently function as peer tutors and instructors for students enrolled in the courses we support
- 5 Media Production Assistants

Most of the projects we support encourage students to learn and present their ideas in new media: video essay assignments, podcasts, infographics, oral presentations, and more. But students are not merely learning *to* create in these media; they are learning *through* filming, podcasting, 3d-modeling, and so on. These new media are, like academic writing, important forms through which students can grapple with a course's material and, crucially, they are tools for *building and making* things with the data and theories and concepts and histories they are learning.

You can also read more about us in a [book chapter we wrote](https://bokcenter.harvard.edu/news/new-bok-center-publication-learning-lab) that documents the launch of the Learning Lab and says a bit more about our process.

You can find many images of our 50 Church St Studio on [our Flickr page](https://www.flickr.com/photos/boklearninglab/albums/72157688059831350). But you are also welcome to stop by--just email [e-mail] if you are ever in town.

### Game Design and the Learning Lab

Game design has been integral to the process of the Learning Lab since its inception.

For many years, gameLab has been one of our core “labs” (see below for more examples). Here, we created a toolkit of game mechanics to help instructors see often overlooked elements of the classroom — its aesthetics, mechanics, technology, and narrative — as assets with which to make the student experience more dynamic and engaging. This led to the creation of [online resources](https://bokcenter.harvard.edu/games) about games for a broad audience. In parallel, we have taught a six-week [Bok Seminar](https://bokcenter.harvard.edu/seminars) for graduate students about game design and teaching. We have helped faculty design creative assignments in which students develop board games about academic subjects, and we recently supported an [English course](https://bokcenter.harvard.edu/news/media-design-fellow-supports-new-video-games-course) that explored storytelling in video games.

And, where the more technical skills of digital game development are concerned, we have helped students and fellows from across the disciplines learn the everything from the basic tools of interactive web-based game development with React.js to the various elements of the video-game production pipeline (3d-modeling, texturing, animation, interaction logic in Unity and Unreal, etc). With each passing year, these skills become increasingly central to the various other domains we support (for instance the widespread use of 3d visualizations in the sciences, the increasing prevalence of realtime production technique in the film and tv industry using Unreal, etc).

### Looking to the Future

One of the goals of undergraduate education at Harvard is to produce thoughtful and empowered citizens, and we have often thought of the work of the Learning Lab as supporting a strong tradition within Harvard of helping students develop communication skills—the skills of the “[Citizen-Orator](https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Quintilian/Institutio_Oratoria/1A*.html).”

By this line of thought, the skills involved in producing podcasts, science-explainer videos, infographic posters and so on could be considered as the modern equivalents of the sorts of public oratory that can *make a difference in the world*. Through these new forms of communication, students learn to synthesize what they have learned in the classroom, distill complex ideas, craft a compelling argument — and take their ideas beyond Harvard's gates.

One challenge we face in this context is that, increasingly, the modes of "content" we can produce in these new media are determined by the norms and cultures and business models of the (relatively few) dominant platforms for digital content. There is something powerfully democratizing about the fact that everyone can now make a TikTok video or an Instagram post. Given the importance of these platforms, it probably *is* important for us to create "Citizen-Content-Creators" if we are trying to help our students have a real impact in the world.

At the same time, we view it as increasingly important that we also devote some of our resources to molding "Citizen-Game-Designers." The skills of world-building, of thinking about interactions and user behavior, or large logic trees and simulation models--all of these move beyond the skills of publishing content on a platform towards *building* worlds and platforms. And maybe the more provocative question might involve whether the Citizen-Content-Creator or the Citizen-Game-Designer is better prepared to be a *leader* in the ways the world needs them to lead going forward.

## links to student work

### academic presentation support

Each year the Learning Lab supports a group of 8 PhD students selected by Harvard's Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences as they develop the skills and visual assets required to deliver 5-8 minute presentations on their research.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CufZCPkEDGQ" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FLcLHyk-18k" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>

### student media projects

Many of the courses we support involve capstone media assignments such as videos, podcasts, 3D virtual museums, posters and performances. Here are some examples of student work from students who have given us permission to share their work.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/yk2axv35Y6A" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WzVkUkxy5ao" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>

### workshops

As students prepare for their final projects, our Media and Design Fellows offer workshops in our studio space intended to teach students the skills and moves required by the final project prompt. Here are a few writeups of MDF-led workshops from this past year.

- In the [Slavic 193: Introduction to Russian and Soviet Film filmmaking workshop](https://hackmd.io/dcfSff1hQParO1vJU4Kk-Q), students explored the possibilities of doing an “updated” Soviet-cinematic final project through various stations, including one in which they used in-studio cameras to make their own shots inspired by the famous kino-glaz shot from Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera and the Kuleshov effect (involving the superimposition of a camera lens over an extreme close-up of an eye).

<p align="center">
<img src="https://files.slack.com/files-pri/T0HTW3H0V-F0458NRB7B7/square-anna-eye_320.gif?pub_secret=3dbc96fe74" alt="Student image 1: eye superimposed with camera lens" style="display: block; margin: 0 auto;">
</p>

<p align="center">
<img src="https://files.slack.com/files-pri/T0HTW3H0V-F0458NRHFDK/eyes-with-eye-2_202.gif?pub_secret=ec23c3dc2d" alt="Student image 3: eye superimposed with eye" style="display: block; margin: 0 auto;">
</p>

- In the [Slavic 132 Russia’s Golden Age: Literature, Arts, and Culture scrollytelling workshop](https://hackmd.io/cBeSXx2kSI-XwHJ0fiN1lw), students were given physical materials (excerpts of texts, images, etc) related to Gogol’s Dead Souls and were asked tocreate layered stories using overhead transparencies or other layering techniques. They then learned to use ArcGIS StoryMaps, where they then created digital scrollytelling projects.
- The Harvard Gazette wrote up a news story on the [ENG189vg Video Game Storytelling workshop](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/03/new-english-class-focuses-on-video-game-narratives/), an interactive, multi-station workshop on game mechanics which our Media & Design Fellow in English designed and facilitated.
- Here is an overview of the support provided to [TDM90DR Harvard Dance Project](https://hackmd.io/-F-1iI9eR9KWe-GjQE3hCg?view), a production-based course focusing on professional movement exploration, choreography, and process.

### labs and prototyping

In order to develop the skills required to support these projects, the entire intergenerational team needs to develop skills in a broad array of media and tools. To accomplish this, they join one of the internal working-and-learning groups we call labs: cineLab, 3dLab, musicLab, theatreLab, codeLab, and so on. In these groups new learner learn the basic tools from more advanced fellows and staff (Blender and Unity or Unreal in 3dLab for intance, server-side js + react or Python in codeLab, etc), and as the term moves along more and more of the team are able to take on larger projects, hold office hours for students in the courses we support, etc.

Below are a few midterm reports and works from some of this year's labs.

- [Midterm 3d Lab Report](https://hackmd.io/HfkToOj2TZuPDsCn3wktAA)
- [Midterm Scroll Lab Report](https://hackmd.io/H3o22XVYRNCaL8EiyGQrKg)
- Chris's [Spatial.com LL](https://www.spatial.io/s/Chriss-Virtual-Place-645ba783356d2edff12c46ac?share=7142957900965085937)