Inquiry-Based Learning in People and Machines

A program of the Hampshire College MacArthur Chair, 1997-2000: Lee Spector

• In what new ways might technology support inquiry-based education?
• What can educators learn from machine learning researchers?
• What can machine learning researchers learn from innovative educators?

Hampshire College, an experimenting institution that promotes innovation in education, is an ideal environment in which to explore these questions. The entire Hampshire community is focused on issues of teaching and learning, and many Hampshire faculty practice a well-articulated form of inquiry-based education. Faculty and students are engaged in a wide range of projects on human and machine learning, including work on a major grant on Learning and Intelligent Systems: Inquiry-Based Science Education: Cognitive Measures and Systems Support from the National Science Foundation (principal investigators: Stillings, Spector, Weisler, Winship, Woolf and Murray).

The Inquiry-based Learning in People and Machines program sponsors a series of distinguished speakers from Hampshire and from the larger community who present and discuss work on human and machine learning. These speakers include Hampshire faculty who discuss particular views of inquiry-based education, technologists working on cutting-edge machine learning systems and educational software, and educators using ideas derived from machine learning or related technologies for educational purposes. The program also sponsors this web site which provides an event schedule, contributions from participants, links to related resources, and an interactive forum.