Individuals
Develop the questions, practices, and confidence to direct your own learning throughout life.
Learning should begin with the world.
Open World Learning Lab explores how people of all ages can turn curiosity, lived experience, practice, and meaningful projects into knowledge and greater agency. We design learning experiences, share ideas, and build toward tools that support learning throughout life.
Education is bigger than school, and learning lasts a lifetime.
Learning takes place through family, work, neighborhoods, books, places, conversations, and the questions we choose to pursue. The world is already full of opportunities to learn.
OWLL studies how curiosity can become understanding people can explain, practice, apply, and revisit. The goal is not less guidance or weaker foundations. It is structured freedom: meaningful support that helps people become increasingly capable of directing their own learning.
The world is the curriculum. Human agency is the purpose.
A learning life belongs to more than one institution.
Our work is for people who want learning to be more connected, self-directed, and human. The pathways below describe who OWLL intends to serve, not programs that are currently open for enrollment.
Families
Discover how adults and children can learn alongside one another. Parents are learners, too.
Educators & Mentors
Explore learning experiences built around real questions, meaningful practice, and human support.
Communities & Researchers
Investigate the conditions that make learning more accessible, rigorous, and connected.
Ten minutes. One real question. Your world.
Try a small learning experience using something already around you. Notice, ask, investigate, explain, and return. No registration, AI, travel, or expensive equipment required.
Try the free inquiry →- Notice
- What is happening right in front of you?
- Question
- What would you like to understand?
- Explore
- What evidence could change your explanation?
An introductory activity, not a validated learning program.
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 learning, designs experiences, 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.
First Landing Prototype
The original six-week First Landing inquiry concept, now informing an eight-stop Water Writes the Landscape prototype in Journey Studio. No field pilot has been validated.
Explore First Landing
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
What if the places we inhabit helped us become more capable learners?
OWLL Learning Environments explores how people, rooms, resources, and learning activities might be designed together. One proposed starting point is a personal learning-space case study, not a commercial installation offer.
Explore Learning Environments →Focus
Space for attention
Explore
Space for inquiry
Make
Space for creation
Reflect
Space for growth
Conceptual learning zones, not a completed room.
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
Design accessible starting points, adaptable support, and opportunities for advanced learning. Raise the floor without limiting ambition; never assume families have the same time, resources, or support.
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 July 2026 snapshot of the lab’s earlier focus, preserved as the research and design direction evolves.
Start a thoughtful conversation.
We welcome thoughtful questions from adult learners, families, educators, researchers, designers, and community organizations. Current work is early-stage, and this is not a program enrollment or service booking channel.