Praise or flow? Two pedagogies for open-ended learning

                                        — Invited Speaker’s Abstract —

                                                    Luc Steels
                                       ICREA (IBE, UPF/CSIC), Barcelona, Spain


Abstract                                                                About the invited speaker
MOOCs have recently flourished as a new way to bring edu-
cation to large numbers of people at affordable cost. However                         Luc Steels studied linguistics at the Univer-
most MOOCs so far rely on rigid structured instruction based                          sity of Antwerp (Belgium) and computer sci-
on prior lesson plans. Can we also develop MOOCs that fol-                            ence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technol-
low the paradigm of open-ended, student-centered learning?                            ogy (USA). His main research field is Artifi-
This requires (i) a challenging environment and tools in which                        cial Intelligence covering a wide range of in-
students can learn how to solve problems without a rigid prior                        telligent abilities, including vision, robotic be-
lesson plan, (ii) ways in which to orchestrate peer-to-peer             havior, conceptual representations and language. In 1983 he
social feedback between students, and (iii) mechanisms fos-             became a professor of computer science at the University of
tering motivation. This talk focuses on the latter. I discuss           Brussels (VUB) and in 1996 he founded Sony Computer Sci-
two pedagogies at opposite ends of a spectrum: one based on             ence Laboratory in Paris and became its first director. Cur-
praise, which means encouragement or possibly punishment,               rently he is an ICREA Research Professor at the Institute for
the other based on flow, which means that students can regu-            Evolutionary Biology (CSIC, UPF). He has been the PI of a
late their own problem challenge in relation to their skill level       dozen large-scale European projects and more than 30 PhD
and thus become self-motivated.                                         theses have been granted under his direction. He has pro-
                                                                        duced over 200 articles and edited 15 books related to his
                                                                        research.




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