The second BILAD network meeting took place from 28 to 30 June 2023, this time at the IWM in Tübingen. “BILAD” stands for ” Educational Reserach at Informal Learning Sites in the Interplay Between Authenticity and Digitality” (in German: „Bildungsforschung an informellen Lernorten im SPannungsfeld von Authentizität und Digitalität“) and is an international research network. A total of 17 research institutions and museums from all over the world are involved in the joint project initiated by the Technical University of Munich and by members of the Realistic Depictions lab.
At the meeting at the IWM, 17 participants primarily discussed the topic of “informal learning” and how it relates to the concept of 4E cognition (Newen, De Bruin & Gallagher, 2020). 4E cognition assumes that learning takes place in an embodied, enacted, extended and embedded way, thereby meeting the characteristics of many museum settings.
The participants of the network meeting discussed these aspects from the perspective of their respective institutions with the aim of developing a possible structure for a joint publication at the end of the meeting. A keynote by Dr Rooske Franse from NEMO, Amsterdam, provided inspiration alongside a tour of the museum at the University of Tübingen and a demo in the IWM’s Mixed Reality Lab.
