Why Cities of Learning?

tl;dr Version

Learning Happens Everywhere

More than anything, the purpose of Cities of Learning is to ensure that learning is recognized in all its forms and places. Education must pursue learning that helps us to live better in every place we find ourselves. Our whole lives and all of our places must be contexts for learning. By aggregating the wealth of Pittsburgh’s learning resources, City of Learning creates an expansive network of opportunities for learners.

Learning Should be Interest-Driven

The City of Learning and Open Badges enable us to document learning wherever it happens. This is not an attempt to control more of a student’s life, but less. In a way, it is an act of faith believing that, given a certain freedom, students will seek out that which interests them. City of Learning hopes to integrate the great resources of our schools with the opportunities in the world beyond: apprenticeships, web videos, service work, mentors, digital challenges, workshops, meetups, games, etc. Through this, we can enable learners to pursue learning driven by their interests, not the limitations of their home base.

Resources Should be Accessible Citywide

The City of Learning initiative is, in many ways, a technology project, but the issues of access that we hope to address in this work go beyond the technical requirement of having a device to log-in. In this work, we hope to address issues of access and equity by creating new out-of-school-time data sets to better inform programmatic funding; to expand learning networks to help learners to find programs outside of their relational network; and to complement school resources by providing them with a wealth of resources that let them us the entire city as their campus.