First Landing Prototype
A proposed six-week place-based learning journey exploring how water shapes land, life, history, and the future of Virginia Beach.
Explore First LandingLearning should begin with the world.
Open World Learning Lab develops place-based learning journeys, mentor-supported structures, intelligent tools, and cumulative learning systems that help learners turn curiosity and lived experience into knowledge, skill, and meaningful work.
Maybe students do not hate knowledge. Maybe they hate knowledge removed from reality.
Modern schooling often separates knowledge from the living contexts that make it matter. Open-world education begins with a different proposition: the world is already full of curriculum.
The challenge is not simply to send learners outside. It is to design enough structure, support, inquiry, practice, and reflection for experience to become durable learning.
The goal is not less structure. It is structured freedom.
Experience becomes learning through a designed loop.
The loop does not end with an answer. It changes what the learner is able to notice next.
- 1. Experience: Begin with a real place, practice, problem, encounter, or question.
- 2. Notice and Capture: Record observations, images, audio, measurements, reactions, and questions through Field Notes.
- 3. Guided Inquiry: Use prompts, credible sources, mentors, peers, and appropriate AI support to investigate what matters.
- 4. Knowledge and Practice: Develop concepts, build skills, and apply new understanding in the world.
- 5. Creation: Produce a field guide, map, essay, explanation, dataset, design, demonstration, performance, or other meaningful artifact.
- 6. Explanation and Reflection: Explain the work, receive feedback, examine the evidence, and notice how understanding has changed.
- 7. Return: Revisit the place, practice, or question with sharper perception and add the experience to a growing Learning Atlas.
OWLL studies the problem, prototypes the experience, and builds toward supporting infrastructure.
Research
Investigates the principles, questions, and conditions behind more connected learning.
Prototype
Designs and tests learning journeys, mentor systems, field tools, and support models.
Infrastructure
Develops LOCUS and related creator systems that may eventually make these approaches repeatable and cumulative.
Two doors into the current work.
LOCUS
An emerging learning system connecting real-world experience, Field Notes, guided inquiry, mentorship, practice, creation, reflection, and cumulative growth.
- Experience
- Field Note
- Question
- Guidance
- Practice
- Artifact
- Feedback
- Learning Atlas
A more powerful learning environment also requires stronger boundaries.
Reality First
Technology should deepen attention to the world, not pull learners away from it.
Consent and Privacy
Recording, data collection, AI use, location information, and participation must be transparent, limited, and meaningfully consensual—especially when minors are involved.
Humans Lead
AI can scaffold, organize, translate, prompt, and support. Teachers, mentors, families, guides, and communities remain responsible for human judgment and care.
Safety Before Spectacle
Outdoor and community-based learning requires preparation, supervision, accessibility planning, risk management, and local knowledge.
Local Respect
Every place has history, ecology, community, memory, ownership, conflict, and limits. Places should not be treated as interchangeable content backdrops.
Equity by Design
Open-world education must not become luxury education for learners who already have access to transportation, technology, safe environments, knowledgeable adults, and flexible schedules.
Founded through practice, not abstraction.
Open World Learning Lab was founded by Peter Pielaet-Strayer, an educator and learning designer whose experience spans student mentorship, teaching, program design, hospitality, and place-based learning. He is currently completing an M.S. in Learning Design and Technology while developing OWLL's first learning journeys and the early LOCUS prototype.
OWLL at a Glance
A concise leave-behind introduction to the lab, its thesis, and its current work.
Start a thoughtful conversation.
OWLL is interested in conversations with educators, mentors, learning designers, researchers, community organizations, technologists, and potential pilot collaborators.