• Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel (map)
  • Boston, MA

Presenters: David Cole (CV2), Jennifer Dick (NEXMAP), Jie Qi (MIT Media Lab), Paul Oh (National Writing Project), Natalie Freed (Lick-Wilmerding High School)

The notebook is a tool used across creative disciplines. Engineers, artists, scientists, musicians, and writers use journals, sketchbooks, and logs to keep track of information, progress, questions, and new ideas. New technologies allow us to re-imagine the notebook, providing opportunities for creative expression powered not just by our imagination but also by circuitry and open networking technologies. In this workshop, we’ll explore how innovative practices and digital media interface in new ways, inspiring learners to transcend the fixed physical and intellectual boundaries of the traditional, analog notebook.

Join us to illuminate your thinking by using easily accessible and inexpensive materials to create circuits in your notebook that literally highlight your “lightbulb moments” with paper circuits and LEDs. We’ll look at how teacher-leaders across the country can use these STEAM-powered techniques with their students to engage in complex design tasks that marry science, art and writing and participate in online learning community discussions about in-school applications.

We’ll explore how the practice of notebooking helps youth, in school and out, develop essential cross-disciplinary skills for today’s world and transforms the notebook from “a thing I have to do for my teacher” to “a tool I use for myself to solve problems and create things.” Because collaboration and sharing are essential elements to developing ideas, we’re experimenting with a prototype notebook and notification system that uses Bluetooth, LEDs and Wi-Fi networks to make real-time connections using between online, digital content and analog, personal content in a journal or sketchbook. Preview this and other prototypes under development by artist-engineers from the MIT Media Lab and NEXMAP who will activate your thinking with sound and light.

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