Informal learning and shopping?

We just finished this workshop on interactive retail spaces where we shared our experience at the University of Arizona Science Center. What does a workshop on interactive retail spaces have to do with informal learning? Well, the answer is: a lot. How many times have you shopped and learned at the same time? Have you ever gone to a Best Buy just to see what is possible or to test and see a new product? The problem is that today’s retail environments don’t see what customers really do today when they buy. According to Pew, 39% of US people used the Internet in 2008 to research products (cell phones). 10% claimed that their research had a major influence on their final purchase decision.

As we all know well, there are several classes of products that we would buy only after seeing and touching them; at the same time, when we are at the store, we often wish we could go back online to find out more about what is in front of us. Unfortunately, retailers seem to ignore this basic truth of 21st century shopping: it is not about online OR brick & mortar, is about BOTH. Sure, most B&M retailers have built their e-commerce site where customers can buy their products, but this is not what customers really want. Customers want to experience shopping online AND offline seamlessly, holistically. They want to be able to research the products they are interested in online, visit the store and carry with them the Trails (results) of their research, try out and touch some of the products they already researched and discover new ones, go back home and review what they did in the store and continue their research online again… until they finally buy!

I don’t think anybody can reasonably claim that this not “learning”. Let me go back to the original question of this blog, then. The shopping experience I just described, it seems to me, is very similar to the very one we designed for the University of Arizona Science Center: visitors interact with amazing exhibits powered by Zonebee and Tinker.it (Arduino) and – when they go home – they can use Zonebee to review their Science Center Trails online and learn more on the Web, sharing their experience with other friends on Facebook or Ning. Some people call all this Informal Learning, other call it Microlearning… What we found out it that existing tools one the Web and IRL (In Real Life) are totally inadequate to support these everyday’s activities that people perform when they work, shop, study, or make decisions about our health. All these activities span across time and geography, are often short in duration but recurrent over longer periods of time, online and in physical spaces like museums, libraries, trade shows and, yes, shopping malls. We designed Zonebee to support these activities: a meta-Web application that helps users to be in control of their learning online and, like in the Science Center, In Real Life.

Zonebee & Informal Learning

When I started the Zonebee project a few years ago, I was pursuing what I thought was a great vision defined by the University of Arizona: to build a Science Center for the 21st Century, a Science Center that would promote scientific thinking and learning beyond the walls of the Center itself, beyond the short time window of a 2-hours visit, a Science Center that would consider itself a piece of a larger learning experience that happened both inside and outside its walls, a Science Center that would help people manage the exponential growth of knowledge generation and its rapid obsolescence, a Science Center that would address its stakeholders as individuals with different needs.

Over time we were able to advance this fantastic vision further, but its basic requirements and fundamental questions are still relevant to us and provide guidance to our project. In a nutshell, therefore:

• We are building a technology that supports users’ learning experience in the physical environment of the Science Center and on the Internet seamlessly and holistically.
• The Internet experience cannot be simply limited to a destination website; too many useful resources are made available each day on the Web and users should be able to take advantage of them within the context of what they want to learn: tools, applications, services, content, etc. Our technology must therefore facilitate the use of all these resources within the context of an organized learning experience.
• As users of our technology seamlessly navigate between their physical and virtual environments, their experiences must be personalized to their individual needs and, at the same time, should be socially sharable in order to generate and facilitate new knowledge.

Over these years spent managing this exciting project I had the privilege to interact with experts in education, cognitive science, instructional technology, brain science, artificial intelligence and interactive design who seeded many of the concepts behind Zonebee. Our technology team spent a lot of time learning from them and engineering a practical approach that would provide a solution that would scale technically, financially and socially. I think we were able to come up with some novel answers to very challenging questions, answers that will at least get us started on a long journey. This Blog is intended to offer a peek into our project and share with you some of our excitement.