Mike Eisenberg: A One of a Kind Pioneer in the Learning Sciences

This year on March 12 Mike Eisenberg passed away—an enormous loss for the learning arts and sciences community. A computer scientist by vocation, a writer with passionate insights, and a maker at heart, he was an endearing one of a kind. He spent his professional career at the University of Boulder in Colorado, where he established the Crafts Technology Lab, a place of wonder and whimsy, for anyone who came to visit Mike, his wife Ann, or any of his students. Where else in one lab could one find bountiful, colorful origami paper figures gracing the shelves, but also microcircuits, reams of ribbons, and laser cutters, 3D printers and sewing machines? Those objects were material evidence of what would become the trademark of Mike’s work: his vision would always be a decade ahead of everyone else. Mike had an uncommon talent to see the forest when everyone else was only looking at the trees, perhaps sparked by his unusual training, life experiences, and family—his electrical engineering father Larry Eisenberg directed the Rockefeller University electronics laboratory, published over 50 science fiction stories, and 13,000 New York Times comments in limerick form.

From 2005–2008, Mike edited the Books & Ideas column at the Journal of the Learning Sciences. Each essay presented a fresh perspective that learning scientists should consider; whether it was Bruce Watson’s history of the erector construction kit, Mike Rose’s focus on vocational education, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek’s studies of children’s play, or Judith Harris’ review of peer culture. His reviews always demonstrated the wide berth from which he examined learning, teaching and education. A gifted educator himself, Mike was well-read in the histories of computing, the sciences, and education, eager to cross disciplinary boundaries (long before it became vogue to be anti-disciplinary), and always curious and forward-looking, but with the troubled wrinkles of history in mind. He was not a techno-romantic, recognizing the urgency of critical inquiries at the complex nexus of technological affordances, human values, and societal futures.

He was a learning scientist at the core, seeking to make technologies transparent and accessible for learners, but also challenging presumed notions of where, how, and with what we should think about learning. What follows is a short reading guide of our favorite pieces and ideas that will remain valuable to the learning sciences and education in years to come.

One of the best examples of Mike’s unparalleled talent to predict (and create!) the future was his work on computational crafts. In the early 1990s, Mike and his wife and collaborative partner Ann started building the foundations for an ambitious research agenda to support creative engagements with computing and crafts. It was a fascinating trajectory, and in writing about it, we realize how much we owe Mike—we are still shamelessly reinventing some of his early ideas. In the first half of the 1990s, they were busy creating one of the first educational software programs for digital fabrication, HyperGami (Eisenberg & Nishioka, 1994), which would enable children to create 3D polyhedra, then transform them into a 2D origami pattern that could be printed on regular paper and cut out. Children could then build complex objects by creatively combining several regular polyhedra. It was first published in an “Origami Science” conference in Japan in 1994—a type of cross-disciplinarity unsurprising for Mike. HyperGami embodied many of the obsessions that Mike would revisit throughout his career: the importance of end-user programmability (Eisenberg, 1997); of bi-directional digital-to-physical fluency; the affordances of tangible materials; the importance of esthetics (HyperGami constructions could have colors, textures, and sophisticated graphics); and the relationships between learning and play. Development on HyperGami continued for years (later renamed as JavaGami, and still functional software), but it was clearly only the beginning.

Close to a decade before the first maker faire would open in the Bay area, Mike and Ann (Eisenberg & Eisenberg (Nishioka), 1998), in writing about “Shop Class for the Next Millennium”, outlined a bold vision for the hi-tech tools and lo-tech materials that should become commonplace in classrooms. While they could easily have chosen science or math classes to make the point—the usual suspects for education reform—they chose shop class instead! Mike and Ann liked to challenge conventional wisdom, and what better place to begin than by situating academic subject matters in a vocational context. With that centring, there was serious consideration for the importance of which tools and materials are chosen for introducing learners to mathematical and scientific ideas and practices:

The world of crafting … could be vastly enriched by the inclusion of appropriate computational devices, languages, and environments. The world of computing could benefit by embedding computation in the huge array of low-cost material substrates available to the home crafter. A systematic detente—an effort to rethink the objects of crafting by seeing when and where they may be endowed with computational capabilities can only expand the range of expression of both cultures (Wrensch & Eisenberg, 1998, p. 89) […] It is important to sustain such precious communities with new, ever-more-expressive media. Perhaps, in the not-too-distant future, we will see these new media in a setting that is neither a ‘crafter’s store’ nor a ‘techie’s store’, but something even a bit more interesting than both taken together. (Op.cit., p. 95)

The titles of Mike’s papers throughout this decade read like chapters in a book about the emergence of the maker movement in education, which he could well have written, and which we can feel now as a void absent of the insightful historicism that he would have proffered: “Computation and Educational Handicrafts: a Strategy for Integrative Design” (Eisenberg, Rubin, & Chen, 1998), “The Programmable Hinge: Toward Computationally Enhanced Crafts,” “Middle Tech: Blurring the Division Between High and Low Tech in Education” (Eisenberg & Eisenberg (Nishioka), 1999), “Integrating Craft Materials and Computation” (Blauvelt, Wrensch, & Eisenberg, 2000), “Output Devices, Computation, and the Future of Mathematical Crafts” (Eisenberg, 2002), and “Tangible ideas for children: Materials Science as the Future of Educational Technology” (Eisenberg, 2004).

But in the mid-1990s, the magnetic pull of the World Wide Web accelerated, and educators fell under the sway of hyperlinks and virtuality. Evidently, Mike and Ann were not swept away by the web mania that took over a significant proportion of educational research involving computers. On the contrary, in their “Shop Class” paper (Eisenberg & Eisenberg (Nishioka), 1998), Mike and Ann state a position that, twenty years later, was rediscovered by many of us in the present era. They considered that the then-current views of cyberspace …

are powerful and compelling; and quite probably, they accurately describe an aspect of computational life that will take on ever-greater importance in the near future. But a relentless and exaggerated focus on “virtuality” is, in our view, myopic. The lived-in day-to-day physical world is itself an endlessly rich space, filled with fun objects whose subtler aspects—longevity, serendipity, nostalgia—will inevitably be captured only imperfectly in less tangible media. The traditional physical materials of craftwork—paper, wax, string, clay, fabric, wood—present challenges and promise rewards that pure graphics and information inevitably fail to capture (p. 24).

After Eisenberg’s 2002 “Output Devices” paper, the technology and engineering schools started to catch up with this vision. By then, 3D printers and laser cutters were more affordable and started to populate a few engineering schools around the world. Physical computing devices such as the MIT Cricket, the Basic Stamp and Lego Mindstorms became staples in hobbyist circles and higher education. The first FabLab was created in the early 2000s at MIT and rapidly expanded. But Mike was not done—while the world was talking about digital fabrication using conventional, “hard” substrates, Mike began a series of explorations into new interfaces and materials, such as memory-shape alloys, electroluminescence, piezoelectrics, aerogels, chemical sensors and thermoreactive materials.

One of those explorations—into a much more prosaic type of material, fabric—would change the face of educational computing, and what would much later be called maker education. Together with his then-student and inventor-extraordinaire, Leah Buechley, they would combine crafting, coding, and circuit design by designing a completely new physical computing platform (based on the Arduino framework) for sewable electronics (Buechley, Elumeze, & Eisenberg, 2006). Who would have thought that one could stitch codeable circuits with conductive thread into clothing? While “making” could encompass everything from woodworking and auto repair to cooking and mixing cocktails, it predominantly features the use of computational tools—both hardware and software—that have become increasingly affordable and accessible to the general public. In electronic textiles, the hands-on fabrication of e-textiles is paired with the learning of decidedly more (at least as popularly perceived) minds-on computing and engineering. Those explorations were not about the “STEM pipeline,” the need for more engineers, or the pressing necessity for US students to compete with other countries in the global economy. Their motivations and perspectives for pursuing this line of research were, as always, about the vital needs for augmenting human expressiveness, spawning powerful ideas, and accelerating youth empowerment.

Mike predicted the future so many times that it provokes the question—how could he do it? The answer might be that he did not see many of the new developments in education as different developments, but as part of the same process. In 2013, at an homage event to Seymour Papert at the Interaction Design and Children Conference in New York City, Mike talked about what he understood to be the deepest intellectual project in constructionism: the fact that powerful tools and ideas could bring entirely new fields of knowledge within the reach of children. Computer programming, for the close observer, was never Papert’s endgame. Logo was as much concerned with reasoning about differential geometry as it was about learning programming. Mike suggested that advancing the constructionist agenda was not so much about making coding and programming omnipresent in schools, but about finding new knowledge domains that were “ripe” for entering the realm of schools. His prediction of the maker movement was centred on that resonant and keystone insight: Mike realized that digital fabrication could be a great carrier of “powerful ideas” and that it was ripe for entering the lives of schools. Digital fabrication and “making” were simply a new embodiment of the motivating logic for Logo—to provide a new tool for legitimate entry into a new and fascinating field of knowledge.

It is noteworthy that Mike was inspired by and taught a course on the contributions of Leonardo da Vinci to the arts, sciences, and technologies. Mike himself was da Vinci-like in his embodiment of not only deep content knowledge—in computer science, mathematics, natural sciences, and engineering—but by embodying an infectious enthusiasm for both theory-based and action-oriented research in educational and learning technologies achievable through making things. Now more so than ever, with CS education making a comeback in schools and maker education moving into classrooms, Mike’s work will not only have been prescient but will remain relevant, generative, stimulating. The makerspaces that are coming into schools, libraries, and neighborhoods are indeed the shop classes of this millennium.

Back in 2013, Mike suggested many possible fields that could be made available to students, such as microbiology, genomics, and particle physics, but already in 2016, he became fascinated by another entirely new possibility: transhumanist technologies. In his Interaction Design and Children paper (Eisenberg, 2017a), and in his FabLearn’ 17 keynote (Eisenberg, 2017b), Mike proposed that educational research should pay attention to some radically new technological possibilities: sensory augmentation, robotic bodily extensions, brain-machine interfaces, and genetic alteration. Sounds like science fiction, but Mike noted that the telescope and the microscope were, in essence, sensory prostheses too. So, what if, in decades to come, children could be “equipped with enhancements for perceiving polarized light, or high frequency sounds, or for detecting chemical gradients?” (p. 330). Transhumanist technologies could enable children to “feel” magnetism or electrical currents, perceive invisible radio wavelengths, or play a musical instrument customized for their own muscular and neural abilities. In reading Mike’s papers on transhumanism, it is clear that he did it again: his prescience sounds just like his papers on maker technologies—those that came 15 years before the maker faire.

And possibly there is no better way to end this tribute than with Mike’s own words from his IDC 2017 paper on transhumanist technologies, that ring true for so much of our work in the Learning Sciences community:

As designers, our situation is reminiscent of an ancient story from Norse mythology concerning the character of Fenrir, a wolf of tremendous potential strength and ferocity... but as a young animal he is adopted by the Norse gods and treated as a pet. Over time, however, the god Odin notices that Fenrir is growing steadily larger The gods’ urgent task, then, is to somehow bind Fenrir—to create a leash strong enough to cope with the beast that he will eventually become. […] The wolf was eventually successfully bound: his leash, rather than a ponderous metal chain, was composed of the lightest, most ethereal elements of imagination and fantasy. The myth has a profound, disturbing effect. It suggests that the greatest dangers to civilization are tamed by inventions of the mind, invisible entities that constitute our collective cultural survival. The technologies of transhumanism might steer us toward dangerous cultural territory; but we, as designers, may yet create an intellectual leash that allows the technology to flourish for children in ways that reflect our own abiding and evolving projects and values. (Eisenberg, 2017a, p. 333)

Those of us who knew him well, and those of you who will come to know him now through his prescient works, will pine for Mike’s voice, his grace, and his forward-looking spirit, which charted pathways for roles of technological innovations in learning and education that will take decades of innovation to realize.