Learning Labs as a specific type of living lab fostering knowledge co-creation and dissemination

TIME

Wednesday, 8th September, 15:30 -17:00 CEST

GOAL

Describe the practices of Learning Labs as spaces of creation, transmission and sharing of knowledge, which are vectors of responsible scientific and educational innovation.

CHALLENGE

Ways of learning are now multiple, physical, virtual, synchronous and asynchronous, etc. Close to Living Labs in many ways, Learning Labs have become an important trend, in private and public area, to develop education innovations and scientific artefacts. More often, they are nested in institutions like universities, but some of them are now deployed in different places as private spaces, third place (Oldenburg, 1991) or even citizen houses. They can be seen as open means to co-create a new model of society, targeting common well-being (Oblinger and Lippincott, 2006). Some of them have mission, as to build a more equitable and inclusive society, and so they can be considered as new types of institutional arrangements designed to enlarge possibilities to carry the voices of apprentices (Boual and Zadra-Veil, 2018) or as collective innovation made for and by users-learners (Lehmann et Colomb, 2020). Like Living labs, they enlist multiple stakeholders to define and to realize unreleased concepts and products or services together. Most of the time, their purpose is to gain new sustainable knowledge that can be applied now and tomorrow.

OBJECTIVE

What is the practical definition and the scope of these Learning Labs? To which extent are they different from Living Labs? What physical, material, financial, tangible and intangible resources do they need (or lack) to design fertile and responsible innovation? Furthermore, what roles do these Learning Labs play for maintaining living ecosystems of innovation, as described by Carayannis and Campbell (2017)?
Those questions will be discussed during our workshop, whose primary goals is to better understand how Learning Labs (alongside Living labs) contribute, in practice, to the transformation of the knowledge society and to the emergence of sustainable and responsible innovation. Another goal is to identify winning conditions to make them stronger and more useful.

OUTCOMES

To better understand how learning labs located within or outside of higher education institutions contribute to the transformation of the knowledge society and to responsible innovation and identify the winning conditions.

BRIEF OUTLINE / METHODOLOGY

VALUE FOR PARTICIPANTS

Presentation of the topic in plenary session
In this introduction we will give definitions of a learning lab, elements of context, examples
Division into sub-groups. We will invite participants to reflect on following questions:
– My vision of a responsible learning lab
– My experience of a learning lab
– The resources I need for a learning lab
– The resources for a more responsible learning lab
Presentation of key take-outs, wrap up and conclusion

We believe that presenting the topic of Learning Labs can allow actors of living labs to have new perspectives on how to co-create and disseminate knowledge.

More generally, by presenting new pedagogical approaches from learning labs, we believe that living labs can benefit from it in many ways:
– how to better animate communities of practice
– how to transmit the experiences of living labs actors
– how to better involve educational institutions in civil society

AUDIENCE

This workshop is mainly intended for people working in education and knowledge transmission. However, as knowledge is not the sole prerogative of educational institutions, this workshop can concern many actors of living labs.