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.