Pea, Roy (2011, March 8). Cyberlearning: An endless frontier for fostering learning in a networked world. CyTSE 2011 Conference Keynote, Berkeley California, USA.
2. Plan
⢠Foreground big problems and needs
⢠Rare policy environment
⢠Why a focus on Cyberlearning?
⢠NSF Cyberlearning report priorities,
recommendations and updates
⢠Links to the National Education
Technology Plan
⢠Central issues for focused effort
3. Big Problems and Needs
⢠A trickling STEM pipeline â and huge associated loss of
human capital from women, people of color and beyond
⢠Shortage of high-quality K-12 STEM teachers
⢠US STEM education: Middling to poor international scores
⢠Diminished STEM interest among learners
⢠Inequalities in technology-enhanced opportunities to learn:
⢠Poor teacher ICT integration, lagging school ICT leadership,
Broadband network gaps - especially in rural America
⢠Only a small percentage of college faculty model
innovative uses of ICT for STEM cyberlearning
⢠Outmoded HS and College Science Lab facilities (NRC)
⢠Un-coordinated and under-prepared cyberlearning R&D
community
⢠Driven global competitors producing far larger % of STEM
degrees and workforce-ready graduates
4. Policy environment
⢠New NSF Cyberlearning program (2011)
⢠National Education Technology Plan (2010)
⢠PCAST K-12 STEM Education report (2010)
⢠ARPA-ED in FY12 Budget ($90Mil)
⢠New common core math standards and shortly
new science education standards (2011)
⢠Obamaâs Educate to Innovate campaign (2010)
⢠Exceptional public-private partnerships taking
shape (âChanging the Equationâ- 2010)
⢠UH OHâŚ.a new deficit reduction oriented
Congress with fiscal and budgetary crises
nationally and most states
5. The Future of Cyberlearning:
A vision of the year 2015âŚ
School Home Mobile technology
access to school
materials and
Virtual Laboratory assignments
Simulations
Learners
Virtual
interaction with
classmates
ns
Visualizatio Supplemental Parents
Teachers of real-time
data
content
from remote
sensors
Lifelong âDigital Portfolioâ
6. What is Cyberlearning?
⢠âLearning that is mediated by networked computing and
communications technologiesâ (NSF Cyberlearning 2008)
â Evokes cyberinfrastructure
â âCyberâ also evokes Wienerâs (1948) âcyberneticsâ â built on the
Greek word for âsteeringâ
⢠Cyberlearning = Learning in a Networked World, where the
âsteeringâ of learning can arise in a hybrid way from a variety of
personal, educational, or collective sources and designs.
⢠Cyberlearning has the potential to transform education throughout a
lifetime, enabling customized interaction with diverse learning
materials on any topic.
7. Why Cyberlearning Now?
NSF funding for
interdisciplinary programs in
cyberlearning
Powerful new Understanding of
technologies how people learn
New, more responsive
methods of
development and testing
Demand for solutions to
educational problems
Credit: John Sondek, Using data to teach geoscience thinking
Cyberlearning
University of North Carolina, Credit: Tracy Gregg
Chapel Hill State University of New York
Buffalo
8. Next decade of technology-enhanced learning
opportunities combinesâŚ
⢠Very-low cost âalways-onâ networked smart mobiles
⢠Elastic cloud computing
⢠Participatory media culture
⢠Increasingly open educational resources, tagged to
learning standards
⢠More accessible open platforms for developing
learning and educational tools to be used by
learners 24/7
⢠Ubiquitous sensors (GPS+) and location-aware
services for learning-in-the world
⢠Increasingly accessible data visualization
⢠Immersive worlds and games â for learning, too
⢠Social networks used for learning and education
9. Youth are (mostly) wired and ready for
tomorrowâs education
⢠93% of 12-17 yr old teens use
the Internet
â˘64% of online teens are
generating new media content
⢠39% of online teens share
online their own artistic
creations, photos, stories, or
videos
⢠28% have created their own
online journal or blog
⢠27% maintain personal
webpages
⢠33% create or work on
webpages or blogs for others
⢠26% remix content they find
online into their own creations
Pew Internet & American Life
Project (December 19, 2007)
11. Whatâs enabled these changes?
ď§ Pervasive information and computing technologies
including mobile devices, connected with networks (cell, wi-fi,
wiredâŚ)
ď§ Web technologies enabling people to share, access, publishâ
and learn fromâonline content and software, across the globe.
ď§ Convergence: Professional tools such as desktop and laptop
computers have begun merging with personal technologies -
mobile phones, PDAs, music players, digital video recorders,
digital cameras, televisions (e.g., Apple TV, Google/Intel TV)
ď§ Networked content today provides a rich immersive learning
environment incorporating accessible data using colorful
visualizations, animated graphics, interactive applications - Not
only âclassroom contentâ â books and videos.
ď§ Cultural change: participatory culture, open resources, sense
of a âdigital commonsâ to contribute to and benefit from
12. Harnessing Collective Intelligence:
A new âdigital commonsâ for learning
⢠Hyperlinking: web usersâ collective activity connects web
pages
⢠Google's PageRank uses web link structure for better search
results
⢠Yahooâs directories serve as portal to collective work of web
users
⢠Tagging helps others find resources such as photos (Flickr),
bookmarks (Del.ic.ious), blogs (Technorati), videos
(YouTube)
⢠Amazonâs science of user engagement leads sales with
âhuman flowâ measures around products
⢠Recommendation engines based on user input help iTunes
sell songs, Amazon sell books, Netflix rent movies
⢠A âlong tailâ for learning resources whatever your intersts
13.
14.
15.
16. Emerging learning environment properties
âIn class I Ihave
âIn class have
to power
to power
downâ
downâ
⢠Fast growing âparticipatory cultureâ engaging youth:
⢠âa culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic
engagement, strong support for creating and sharing oneâs creations,
and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is know by the
most experienced is passed along to novicesâ (Jenkins, 2006)
⢠Fueled by âsoftware-as-servicesâ (SAS) platforms - Web 2.0
technologies such as wikis, blogs, Youtube, Flickr, social
bookmarking, Google Apps from Gmail to Gdocs to GVoice
⢠Driven by social networking applications like Facebook (630+ Mil
users)âŚand other communication tools such as SMS texting)
⢠On-demand learning resources sought out via search engines
⢠Increasingly pervasive, increasingly mobile:
⢠In 2015, 1 billion new smart phones bought globally will enable web
searching and multimedia communications - for under $50
17. âThe central fact about our psychology
is the fact of mediationâ
(Vygotsky, 1933/1982, p. 166).
Lev S.
Vygotsky
18. Centrality of Mediation in Cyberlearning
⢠Subject and object are connected directly, but
also indirectly, through the mediation of
cultural artifacts, as with written language and
math.
⢠But also: programming, diagramming, maps, art,
and including todayâs virtual worlds and massively
L.S. Vygotsky multiplayer games.
(c. 1930)
⢠As a result of mediation, human experiences
â and how people learn âhave evolved
substantially in the past several millenia
without evolution of our biological substrate.
âSites such as MySpace or YouTube are more than just collections of pages or videos,
they are communities of interest and in some cases are networks of practice. Shared
interests provide a reason for people to come together, while networks of practice
provide the technological means to share and create practices.â
- Douglas Thomas & John Seely Brown, 2009, âWhy virtual worlds can matter,â
International Journal of Learning and Media
19. Cultural history in
the moment of its making
⢠Part of what is exciting about this focus on
mediation is that it provides the opportunity
to connect cultural-historical processes to
individual mental and social interactive
processes in situated action.
⢠As Jim Wertsch puts it: "It is because
humans internalize forms of mediation
provided by particular cultural, historical and
institutional forces that their mental
functioning [becomes] socio-historically
situated" (Daniels et al., 2002, p. 178).
21. A Brief History of Technological Advances
Making Cyberlearning Possible
22. In principle, exceptional resources
for human learning and activitiesâŚ
⌠will become continuously accessible through
networks of information, people and services.
BUT
Do we know enough about learning over space and
time â across formal and informal environments â
to guide design of learning supports in the ubiquitous
mobile computing future?
23. LIFE Center Purpose
To develop and test principles about the social foundations of
human learning in informal and formal environments, including
how people learn to innovate in contemporary society, with the
goal of enhancing human learning from infancy to adulthood
24. Complex relations of âinformalâ and âformalâ learning
Formal settings Informal settings
Designed learning Explicitly structured
Formal opportunities with and guided with
Learning curricula in school designed artifacts,
Processes (e.g. math lessons and environment features
assignments). (after-school club, sport)
Outside curriculum: Spontaneous and
Emergent learning of improvised, self-
social or cognitive organizing
Informal
Learning content (e.g. adolescent gaming
Processes (e.g. leadership, gender friends)
roles, friendship)
Roy Pea, Stanford University
25. Learning Ecology Framework
(Brigid Barron)
Accessed set of contexts,
comprised of configurations of Contexts of
activities, material resources,
and relationships that are found Development
in co-located physical or virtual
spaces that provide
opportunities for learning.
(Source: B. Barron, Human
Development, 2006)
⢠Unit of analysis is person and
multiple life spaces
⢠A learning ecology is dynamic
⢠Subject to interventions
⢠Activities, ideas are more or less
boundary crossing
⢠Influences: Lewin,
Bronfenbrenner, Cole, EngestrĂśm,
Lave, Rogoff, Saxe, Vygotsky
Framework has descriptive and prescriptive use
26. Web hosting business, Chat-bot business: â˘â˘â˘ online
AJ
programming courses, books, robotics club â˘â˘â˘ 7 years of
activity
Robotics, Grow with me kit, consultant; Science Fair design
Caleb
project â˘â˘â˘ online course, job with company, robotics club
â˘â˘â˘ 8 years of activity
Robotics, web design work, DVD business â˘â˘â˘ Summer camp,
Craig
school courses, online course, church â˘â˘â˘ 5 years of activity
Playing Halo; spaceship animations using Flash, digital art
Alex
â˘â˘â˘ 2 courses â˘â˘â˘ 6 years of activity
Elizabeth
Photoshop art, games, movies, scriptsâ˘â˘â˘web-design
classâ˘â˘â˘ 5 years of activity
Stephanie
Programming, music videos, short movies, blogs â˘â˘â˘ Web
design, programming, video classes â˘â˘â˘ 1.5 years of activity
Robotics, digital art, blogs, video editing â˘â˘â˘ Web design class,
Marybeth
programming class, girl-tech club â˘â˘â˘ 2 years of activity
Blog, learning C++, graphics design tool POV-Ray â˘â˘â˘
Layla
programming class, online learning communityâ˘â˘â˘ 1 year of
activity *Source: Barron, Martin, Takeuchi, Fithian, 2009, The International Journal of Learning
and Media (MIT Press)
27. Mapping learning activity across setting and time
Case analyses indicate that most sustained learning projects have been aided by one
or more learning partners, and that choices of learning opportunities often had
dramatic consequences for expertise development â learning is profoundly social
Learning partners
father
Community
School
Home
28.
29. Key Strategies and Opportunities for NSF
⢠Strategies for promoting growth of a cyberlearning
infrastructure.
⢠Opportunities for action toward the greatest
short-term payoff and long-term promise.
⢠Priorities and Associated Recommendations
1. Develop talent and advance technologies
2. Enable students to use scientific data
3. Harness learning data
4. Support broader audiences: Dual use for research and
education; large scaling by platform design
5. Sustain cyberlearning materials beyond NSF funding
30. Priority #1
Develop Field and Advance Technologies
⢠Strategy: Promoting new talent (programs,
centers, training) and new technology
⢠Opportunity: Using technologies to:
â Coordinate learning across formal and informal
contexts
â Connect students with remote and virtual
laboratories
â Access interactive virtual or
âmixed realityâ environments
Ann Myers Medical Clinic in Second Life
Image credit: Scienceroll blog
World of Warcraft
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/burningcrusade/imageviewer.html?/burningcrusade/,images/screenshots/,116,241,http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/burningcrusade/screenshots.html?14@27
31. Recommendation #1
Build a vibrant cyberlearning field
⢠Promote cross-disciplinary communities of
cyberlearning researchers and
practitioners including
â Technologists
â Educators
â Domain scientists
â Social scientists
⢠Publish best practices
⢠Recruit diverse talents
Relationships Among Scientific Paradigms
(Credit: Research & Node Layout: Kevin Boyack and Dick Klavans (mapofscience.com);
Data: Thompson ISI; Graphics & Typography: W. Bradford Paley (didi.com/brad); Commissioned Katy BĂśrner (scimaps.org))
32. Priority #2
Enable Students to Use Scientific Data
⢠Strategy: Transforming STEM disciplines and
Kâ12 education
â New ways of looking at and understanding content
â Preparing students for âcomputational thinkingâ
⢠Opportunity: Teaching students and
teachers how to harness
large amounts of data
â Scientific research
â Responsible use of data
33. Recommendation #2
Emphasize the transformative power of
technology at all levels
⢠Information and communication technologies that:
â Allow interaction with data, visualizations, remote and
virtual laboratories, and experts
â Bridge multiple learning environments and technologies
⢠Support teachersâ professional development
through
â Training programs
â Professional societies
â Collaborating to create
new open access teaching materials
⢠Lifelong potential for learning, from âK to greyâ
Intel Classmate PC
Photo credit: Getty Images
34. Priority #3
Harness Learning Data
⢠Strategy: Leveraging the data produced by
cyberlearning systems
â Teachers interacting with students and their school
assignments
â Studentsâ educational histories
⢠Opportunity: Encouraging shared systems
that allow large-scale deployment, feedback,
and improvement
Pittsburgh Science of Learning Centerâs DataShop: learnlab.web.cmu.edu/datashop
35. Recommendation #3:
Instill a âplatform perspectiveâ
⢠Platform = shared, interoperable,
extensible designs of hardware,
software, and services
⢠Think large-scale (elastic web
services) from the start, not scale-
up from one to more classrooms
⢠Incorporate and support
â New technological innovations
â Fully tested modules for classroom
use
⢠Widely usable now and in the
future
⢠Guidance from expert panel
36. Cumulative and integrative
⢠Why not do far more to make cumulative the
technology developments we advance for
STEM learning and teaching?
⢠Why not plan more for integration of multi-
project R&D efforts?
⢠Example: Stanford Courseware, ClassX
⢠Example: Stanford/Linnaeus (Sweden) LETS
GO Project and National Geographic Society
Fieldscope
39. Priority #4
Support Broader Audiences
⢠Strategy: Create tested, customizable, open
source materials
â Refine materials for new audiences
â Scale successful materials to larger
communities WISE in New Languages
⢠Opportunity: Funding
development of resources
usable for both research
and education
WISE Project Customized for use in Taiwan
Professor Hsu
40. Recommendation #4
Promote open educational resources
⢠OER â a global movement to make high quality
educational materials open (free) on the Web,
with permission for unrestricted sharing, reuse
and recombination, in all languages â all
devices, and part of a growing culture of
openness and sharing
⢠New NSF proposals should plan to make their
materials available and sustainable
41. Examples of OERs
OpenâŚ
CourseWareâŚcoursesâŚbooksâŚsimulationsâŚ
journals⌠imagesâŚvideo lecturesâŚgamesâŚ
textbooksâŚpodcastsâŚlesson plans
encyclopedias..heavens..portals
Efforts throughout worldâŚ
Vietnam, China, India, Europe, South America
Africa, United States, Canada, Brazil, âŚ
Universities, K-12 schools, libraries, publishing companies,
governments, public television, hi-tech companies, museums,
individuals âŚ
42. Priority #5
Sustain Cyberlearning Materials
⢠Strategy: Sustaining cyberlearning
innovations beyond their initial funding
⢠Opportunity: Guaranteeing future availability
of Open Education Resources
SimCalc Project iLab Inverted Pendulum:
http://www.kaputcenter.umassd.edu/downloads/products/technical_reports/tr1_1.pdf Mark Schulz, iLab
43. Recommendation # 5
Sustain NSF-sponsored projects
⢠Maintain cyberlearning innovations beyond
the funding of a grant
⢠Extend initiatives across NSF divisions and
create external partnerships
Industry Science
Technology
STEM
Educational Initiatives
Engineering
Organizations
Professional
Mathematics
NSF
Science
Social SBE
Science
Institu
Behavioral
Oth
44. Task Force Recommendations
1. Build a vibrant cross-disciplinary
cyberlearning field
2. Instill a âplatform perspectiveâ: shared,
interoperable designs of hardware,
software, and services
3. Emphasize the transformative power of
technology
4. Adopt programs and policies to
promote open educational resources
5. Sustain NSF-sponsored projects
beyond grant funding with new
partnerships Relationships Among Scientific Paradigms
(Credit: Research & Node Layout: Kevin Boyack and Dick Klavans (mapofscience.com);
Data: Thompson ISI; Graphics & Typography: W. Bradford Paley (didi.com/brad); Commissioned Katy BĂśrner (scimaps.org))
45. ⢠Advances in cyberlearning technologies and the
sciences of learning promise exceptional opportunities
for transformative advances in learning for all.
46. Uncommon Times since June-08 release of
NSF Cyberlearning Report
⢠Smartphones, iPad, and associated explosive
growth of app marketplace (500,000+ apps
across platforms)
⢠Emergence of the social graph (Facebook,
Google), and social and real-time search
⢠Rapid cloud computing uptake and continued
developments (e.g. Google Apps, Amazon,
Microsoft)
⢠New Common Core Standards (Math, ELA),
Science Standards in 2011
⢠Inspiring visions in the policy environment of
NETP, PCAST K-12 STEM, Educate to Innovate
47. Strategic Areas for NSF and our
fields
⢠#1 â Far more STRATEGY and COORDINATION - #1
⢠Open platforms for open STEM education resource
development and integration by teachers, faculty
⢠Open âdeeply digitalâ STEM courseware informed by learning
sciences (and associated pedagogical models, assessments,
professional development, educational data-mining)
⢠Physical and virtual places for learners to be inspired by and
participate in STEM-rich institutions, and new virtual and
remote labs (connecting to e-science)
⢠Comprehensive formal-informal STEM learning pathway
architectures including gaming and social media approaches
⢠âFollow-throughâ on new Math and Science Standards
⢠Large-scale programs to promote universal computational
thinking (e.g., Scratch, Alice, Android App Inventor)
48. And âSTEMâ is too limiting as a focus
⢠We need STEAM!!!
⢠Arts (and Humanities and DesignâŚ)
⢠As science and the arts have always
developed hand-in-hand
49.
50. Key Messages
⢠The NETP is a Five-Year Action Plan for
Transforming American Education, Powered by
Technology
⢠Urgent national priority, based on a growing understanding of
what we need to do to remain competitive in a global economy.
⢠A Rigorous and Inclusive Process
⢠Based on report of Technical Working Group of leading
education researchers & practitioners, & input from tens of
thousands of education leaders and the public.
⢠Five Goals, Recommendations and an Action Plan
⢠5 essential components of a 21st century model powered by
technology: Learning, Assessment, Teaching, Infrastructure, and
Productivity
⢠The Time to Act is Now
51. âTransformation, Not Evolutionâ
⢠Must embrace a strategy of innovation, prompt
implementation, regular evaluation, continuous
improvement.
⢠Programs & projects that work must be brought to
scale so every school has the opportunities.
⢠Regulations, policies, actions, and investments must
be strategic and coherent.
⢠NETP presents goals, recommendations, and an
action plan for revolutionary transformation rather
than evolutionary tinkering.
52. Informed by the Learning Sciences,
Powered by Technology
⢠Advances in the learning sciences give us
valuable insights into how people learn.
⢠The new recognition of life-long, life-wide
learning ecologies requires new designs.
⢠Technology innovations give us the ability to
act on these insights as never before.
53. âBroadband Everywhereâ
⢠NETP relies on
broadband initiatives
funded by the American
Recovery and
Reinvestment Act of
2009
⢠FCCâs broadband plan
to accelerate broadband
deployment in unserved,
underserved, and rural
areas.
54. NETPâs Five Goals
1. Learning âAll learners will have engaging and empowering
learning experiences both in and outside of school that prepare them to
be active, creative, knowledgeable, and ethical participants in our
globally networked societyâ
2. Assessment âOur education system at all levels will leverage the
power of technology to measure what matters and use assessment data
for continuous improvement.â
3. Teaching âProfessional educators will be supported individually
and in teams by technology that connects them to data, content,
resources, expertise, and learning experiences that can empower and
inspire them to provide more effective teaching to all learners.â
4. Infrastructure âAll students and educators will have access to a
comprehensive infrastructure for learning when and where they need it.â
5. Productivity âOur education system at all levels will redesign
processes and structures to take advantage of the power of technology
to improve learning outcomes while making more efficient use of time,
money, and staff.â
55. 1. Learning
⢠The model of 21st century learning puts
students at the center and empowers them to
take control of their learning.
⢠The model asks that we change what and how
we teach to match what people need to know,
how they learn, where and when they will
learn, and who needs to learn.
⢠It calls for bringing state-of-the art technology
into learning in meaningful ways to engage,
motivate, and inspire students to achieve.
56.
57. 2. Assessment
⢠The learning sciences, technologies, and assessment theory
provide a strong foundation for much-needed improvements
in assessment.
⢠These include new and better ways to measure what
matters, diagnose strengths and weaknesses in the course
of learning when there is still time to improve student
performance, and involve multiple stakeholders in the
process of designing, conducting, and using assessment.
⢠This plan looks to technology-based assessment to provide
data to drive decisions on the basis of what is best for each
and every student, and that in aggregate will lead to
continuous improvement across our entire education
system.
58. 3. Teaching
⢠Teaching today is a profession practiced much as it has
been done for the past century and mostly in isolation.
Transforming our education system will require a new
model of teaching that strengthens and elevates the
profession.
⢠Just as leveraging technology can help us improve
learning and assessment, technology can help us build
the capacity of educators by enabling a shift to a model of
connected teaching.
⢠In a connected teaching model, connection replaces
isolation, and classrooms are fully instrumented with 24/7
access to data about student learning, and analytic tools
that help educators act on the insights the data provide.
59. 4. Infrastructure
⢠A comprehensive infrastructure for learning that provides
every student, educator and level of our education system
with the resources they need is necessary to transform our
education system.
⢠Its essential underlying principle is that infrastructure
includes people, processes, learning resources, and
policies, and sustainable models for continuous
improvement in addition to broadband connectivity,
servers, software, management systems, and
administration tools.
⢠Building such an infrastructure is a far-reaching project that
will demand concerted and coordinated effort to achieve.
60.
61. 5. Productivity
⢠While investment in education is important to transforming
education, tight economic times and basic fiscal responsibility
demand that we get more out of each dollar we spend.
⢠We must be clear about the learning outcomes we expect from
the investments we make.
⢠We must leverage technology to plan, manage, monitor, and
report spending to provide decision-makers with a reliable,
accurate, and complete view of the financial performance of
our education system at all levels.
⢠Such visibility is essential to our commitment to continuous
improvement, and our ability to continually measure and
improve the productivity of our education system to meet our
goals for educational attainment within the budgets we can
afford.
62. We should define and tackle
Grand Challenge Problems:
Ambitious and funded
R&D efforts that
support this plan
63. Grand Challenge Problems: History
⢠A grand challenge defines a
commitment by a scientific community
to work together towards a common
goal - valuable and achievable within a
predicted timescale.
⢠Predecessor: Hilbertâs 1900 address to
International Congress of Mathematicians on
23 major mathematical problems to be studied
for the next century.
⢠âGrand Challengesâ: major problems of
science and society whose solutions require
1000-fold or greater increases in the power
and speed of supercomputers and their
supporting networks, storage systems,
software and virtual environments:
⢠U.S. High Performance Computing and Larry Smarr, NCSA
Communications program (HPCC, 1991) Director, c. 1989
64. Cyberlearning GCP Criteria
1) Understandable, with Significance. Inspiration
Clearly stated compelling case for
contributing to long term benefits for science,
industry and society.
1) Challenging, and Timely.
Hard problems within conceivable reach in
15-20 years with concerted coordinated
efforts.
Jim Gray:
1) Clearly useful, in terms of Impact Director,
and Scale, if problem is solved. Microsoft
Research Lab,
Contributes to long term benefits for many San Francisco
people at large, and with international scope. Jim Gray (2003).
What Next? A
1) Metrics: Testable and Incremental. Dozen Information-
Technology
Can measure progress, incremental Research Goals.
Journal of the
milestones. ACM, 50(1), 41â57.
65. Grand Challenge Problem #1
⢠âDesign and validate an integrated system that
provides real-time access to learning experiences
tuned to the levels of difficulty and assistance that
optimize learning for all learners, and that
incorporates self-improving features that enable it
to become increasingly effective through
interaction with learners.â
66. ⢠Integrated system should: Discover appropriate learning resourcesâŚ
⢠Configure the resources with forms of representation and expression
that are appropriate for the learnerâs age, language, reading ability,
and prior knowledge.
⢠Select appropriate paths and scaffolds for moving the learner through
the learning resources with the ideal level of challenge and support.
⢠As part of system validation, must examine leverage gained by giving
learners control over their learning pace & whether certain knowledge
domains or competencies require educators to keep control.
⢠Need to better understand where & when we can replace the the
educator-led classroom model with learner judgment, online peer
interactivity and coaching, and technological advances such as smart
tutors and avatars
67. Grand Challenge Problem #2-4 for
new systems of assessment, and for
tracking progress on educational
productivity goals
68. Central Open Questions
⢠How to be more strategic across NSF, other government
funding agencies and private foundations on
Cyberlearning?
⢠What should be the relationship of NSF+ priorities and
activities to industry developments?
⢠âAchieving the Nationâs goals for STEM education in K-12 will
require partnerships with state and local government and with the
private and philanthrophic sectorsâ (PCAST 2010 K-12 STEM
Education)
⢠What mechanisms can we use to rapidly build the
Cyberlearning Field and Community?
⢠e.g. Summer Institutes â public-private partner-funded â on
university and industry campuses
69. Central Open Questions
⢠How can far more teachers be supported in
technology integration within STEM courses for
deeper student learning?
⢠Challenges of rapidly changing technologies call for
new strategies and models
⢠Platform-based approaches for âconnected teachingâ
(NETP 2010)
⢠How can educational system policies adapt
more rapidly to the present opportunities?
⢠Examples: Mobiles and social media in schools,
gamification of learning environments, FERPA
constraints on teacher video sharing
70. Summary
1. Highlighted why cyberlearning and
recommendations for the work ahead
2. Summarized sweeping changes in our
technology environments and futures for learning
and teaching as we advance how learning is
mediated
3. Challenged us to develop theory to guide
technology-enhanced learning across contexts
4. Reviewed key elements of the NETP:
revolutionary, system-redesign, beyond-school
5. Suggested high priorities for open questions to
tackle as a community soon
71. Draft
March 5th, 2010
Final Release
September 10th, 2010
Final Release
June 24th, 2008
Final Release
November 9th, 2010
- An intentional echo of Vannevar Bushâs founding document for the NSF âhis 1950 volume: Science: The Endless Frontier. - Why? Because cyberlearning IS an endless frontier- we will never be done â the content will always be advancing; the representational and computational technologies and associated user experiences with content with which we learn will always be developing â as will the social and organizational arrangements in which we find ourselves doing this learning. With our endless ability to continue to innovate new designs for how we learn the complexities of the evolving disciplines â we will never be done. - Cyberlearning WILL be an endless frontier.
NOTE â Why STEM focus? On the community point - The US âsceneâ in learning sciences and technologies programs isnt ready to be responsive to the Mooreâs Law, Metcalfeâs Law and other accelerative drivers of technology developments in society today. It does not know yet how to deal with Googleâs Map-Reduce software framework for large scale distributed data processing, Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing, or many other cyberinfrastructures. It is rarely developing in iOS, Android, Windows mobile OSâs â or on web development in AJAX or Flex paradigms that are shaping user experiences in todayâs expansive web. - Not all of these problems admit of technological solutions â but ICT designs could catalyze advances and accelerate needed transformations.
Imagine a high school student in 2015. Sheâs grown up in a world where learning is as accessible through technologies at home as it is in the classroom, and digital content is as real to her as paper, lab equipment, or textbooks. **At school, she and her classmates engage in creative problem-solving activities by manipulating simulations in a virtual laboratory or by downloading and analyzing visualizations of real-time data from remote sensors . **Away from class, she has seamless access to school materials & homework assignments using inexpensive mobile technologies . She continues to collaborate with her classmates in virtual environments that allow not only social interaction with each other but also rich connections with a wealth of supplementary content. ** Her teacher can track her progress over the course of a lesson plan and compare her performance and aptitudes across a lifelong âdigital portfolio,â making note of areas that need additional attention through personalized assignments and alerting parents to specific concerns. While in the NSF taskforce scenario the learning environment design is driven from school standards and topics, a comparable scenario could be driven from a peer group interested in advancing their learning, as in creating game mods to achieve higher levels of massively multiple player game play, or a community might be learning how to assess water quality and consider environmental justice issues associated with pollution being situated in the low-income neighborhoods.
Enter Cyberlearning â as a new innovative force to address some of these problems for STEM education. Evokes cyberinfrastructure: âif infrastructure is required for an industrial economy, then we could say that cyberinfrastructure is required for a knowledge economy.â â Cyberâ also evokes Wienerâs (1948) âcyberneticsâ â built on the Greek term for âsteeringâ as a way to signal the intertwined tapestry of concepts relating the goal-directed actions, predictions, feedback, and responses in the physical, social, engineering systems for which cybernetics was to provide an explanatory framework .
Cyberlearning has tremendous potential right now because we have powerful new technologies, increased understanding of learning and instruction, and widespread demand for solutions to educational problems. Over the last 10-20 years, the design of technologies and our understanding of how people learn have evolved together, while new approaches to research & design make the development and testing of technologies more responsive to real-world requirements and learning environments. Visual programming languages for children Microworlds for learning computational thinking in science, technology, engineering and mathematics Intelligent tutoring systems in algebra, geometry, programming, chemistry, statâs, foreign languages Microcomputer-based laboratories and handheld computing versions of probeware and sensors for capturing and graphing data during scientific inquiry Online learning communities for teachers and learners in many subject domains Data visualization environments for examining and understanding complexity in the STEM disciplines Educational robotics STEM learning games and virtual worlds
- These developments promise widespread access to increasingly sophisticated technologies and advances in understanding of how individuals learn - which should combine to provide a stunning opportunity to transform education worldwide. These advances are extremely important since we cannot even physically construct the needed universities, schools, and classrooms to serve education needs, especially in the developing world. Right in front of our eyes, the learning and educational platform of the century ahead is emerging, and it is not the classroom or the school, although I deeply hope that schools and classrooms and educators can figure out how to harness these resources. - Surprising result to many is thatâŚ
** UPDATE OR DUMP THIS SLIDE** Note her concurrent open channels of the cell call, myspace social network, iPod music player, several books and television. - Yet many of todayâs digital natives, who exploit these tools to understand and learn on their own, often find schools unchanged from those of their parents and certainly unconnected from their real time ties to the web for information and their friends that they experience outside school.
A Nielsen survey indicates that at the end of 2010, nearly a third of US mobile users had smartphones, with the installed base evenly tied between Apple, RIM, and Android licensees. Projections are this percentage will double in two years and that prices will drop below $50.
A major observation today is that ICT - information and computing technologies - has become ubiquitous for everyday use in developed nations, with huge and relatively unexplored implications for education. - Over 2 BILLION people have access to the internet (over a 600 million new people since we published our cyberlearning report in Summer 2008). Nearly 5 Bil people have a mobile phone. Proportion of these mobiles that are on broadband networks is rapidly growing â in Europe, 50% penetration by 2013. Professional technologies such as desktop and laptop computers have begun to merge with personal technologies such as mobile phones, PDAs, music players, digital video recorders, digital cameras, TVs â changing the HOME MEDIA ECOLOGY - Cultural change: A new era of Web-enabled applications built around user-generated or user-manipulated content - wikis, blogs, podcasts, sites for sharing video and photos & social networking, virtual worlds â new value arising from harnessing collective intelligence for a âdigital commonsâ â not only being an AUDIENCE to content but a CREATOR
A major reason why we are spending so much more time online is that we collectively have been making that information much more useful to us.
And this is not counting the past 5 yrs of innovation such as the iPod, iPhone and iPad, and Android phones.
Grown since these graphics were developed last year â 35 hrs of video are now uploaded every minute into Youtube (11/10); 700 billion playbacks in 2010.
Date as of 3/11 on FB; Smartphones will comprise themajority of all phones sold in 2012.
I know want to shift to provide a historical framing to the future of cyberlearning⌠The centrality of mediation is vital for learning futures, as we see the historical framing of our current moment.
I know want to shift to provide a historical framing to the future of cyberlearning⌠The centrality of mediation is vital for learning futures, as we see the historical framing of our current moment.
This figure depicts historical advances in the communication and information resources available for human interaction. Basic face-to-face interaction at the most basic level required no resources to mediate communication. The second wave of resources offered symbol systems such as written language, graphics, and mathematics but introduced a mediating layer between people. The communication revolution of radio, telephony, television, and satellites was the third wave. The outcomes of the fourth waveânetworked personal computers, web publishing, and global searchâset the stage for the fifth wave of cyberinfrastructure and participatory technologies that we reviewed. In sum, the set of actions and interactions people consider possible has changed with each new wave of mediating technologies, from writing to telephony to the Internet and now cyberinfrastructure. We can now interact at a distance, accessing complex and useful resources in ways unimaginable in early eras â changing possible goals, intentions for action and means for achieving them.
⢠The opportunities for cyberlearning need to be situated in the context of growing realizations of the importance of learning outside of school ⢠Our unique LIFE focus - to deeply examine the special roles of the social in learning. Learning in K-12 settings under 20% awake time â relatively unexplored sea of blue for learning the other 80% time. Greater potential than realized for harvesting âfunds of knowledgeâ from peopleâs learning experiences outside of classrooms. Many more forms of productive learning are found and experienced outside school than those exploited by schooling today. ⢠We can imagine a future of seamless networked STEM learning across formal and informal learning environments ⢠Cyberlearning affords the opportunity with mobiles and related always-on service to do the BRIDGING, to make the learning PATHWAYS which are resonant with learner interests and which can incorporate learning from out-of-classroom experiences that is relevant to developing STEM competencies.
As a quick view on the complexities involved in developing understanding of informal and formal learning and their interrelationships, consider formal/informal settings and formal/informal learning processes. Upper left and bottom right as extremes. But other two cells quite interesting as well. We need technology-enhanced supports for all of these varieties of informal and formal cyberlearning.
LIFE Professor Brigid Barron@ Stanford has developed a learning ecology framework in which technobiography timelines are mapped out from interviews with adolescent learners and their learning partners, family, and teachers - These technobiography timelines depict the CONTENT of key developments in technological fluencies (e.g., digital art creation; commercial web development) and their CONTEXTS (e.g., home, school, neighborhood), key PARTICIPANTS, and âturning pointsâ perceived by the learner and other stakeholders to have considerable significance for the choices they make in their learning pathways later. A major result from this work is the multi-directionality of technological fluency development - school is actually often under-resourced in courses and teachers for the kinds of things that the learners WANT to learn, and so distributed web resources, social networks in their peer community or online, brokering of learning opportunities by parents (among other roles they play) end up being major contributors to the learning pathways that the learners enact.
Explain context of selecting 8 case studies â several hundred Silicon Valley youth completing technology experience surveys in which breadth and depth of engagement across different creative uses of technology were asked about. These are high-end cases from this sample, and the hope was to begin to understand some of the conditions associated with such broad and deep technology fluency engagements and learning.
This technobiography timeline depicts the diverse social influences and interests which drove AJ to become extremely technically proficient by his 13 th year, running two different tech services companies while still going to school fulltime. - Then read the HEADER.
* With the framing of the opportunities for cyberlearning and their theoretical foundations in mind, and the concept of learning ecologies across settings as a useful tool, now let us turn to the NSF task force report that inspired the theme of your conference : Fostering Learning in the Networked World. * I enjoyed working on this with my colleagues and would like to share its main findings and recommendations â and bring new developments and examples to fore for your consideration.
Transition - Cyberlearning requires a coherent, supportive infrastructure and to effectively grow one we recommended a set of strategies and their associated research questions for building a cyberlearning infrastructure â and we described opportunities for action that we considered to have the greatest short-term payoff and long term promise.
Among the special opportunities for action we felt to have the greatest short-term payoff and long-term promise are those that tap into the potential of technologies to coordinate learning across multiple contexts as with mobiles ; those that connect students with remote and virtual laboratories (with high school and college labs often in bad shape); and those that develop and exploit virtual or âmixed realityâ environments for interactive exchanges for cyberlearning . Many other promising areas but we felt these especially central. *MANY INSPIRING INSTANCES OF THESE DEVELOPMENTS REPRESENTED AS OUR CONFERENCE HERE AND THANKS TO KEMI JONA AND OTHERS FOR ORGANIZING THESE EVENTS! Background image above is from World of Warcraft Inset images are from Second Life, Virtual Anatomy project (NSF SciVis competition), and 1st Google phone from T-Mobile running the Android open development platform for web apps
Building Human capacity is a real issue. The field is moving rapidly and needs new cross-disciplinary contributors to experiment, develop best practices, and develop new career paths. Help build a vibrant cyberlearning field by promoting cross-disciplinary communities of cyberlearning researchers and practitioners including software developers and IT staff, educators at all levels, domain scientists, and social scientists - and equip them for carrying forward cyberlearning effectively in new cyberlearning programs in colleges and universities and for benefiting K-12. NSF can advance their insights through the publication of best practices and the ongoing recruitment of diverse talents to carry the field forward. URL: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7446536@N03/430561725/
We emphasized ways that cyberlearning can transform â and not only make more efficient STEM disciplines and Kâ12 education â technologies allow new ways of looking at and understanding content; and can prepare students for computational thinking throughout curricular topics. The growing deluge of data is another key concern. Students and teachers alike need to be taught how to manage large amounts of data, whether produced through scientific research - or collected as part of a studentâs educational history. About the image: GalaxyZoo.org In July 2007 a group of astronomers created a âmashupâ of galaxy images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (âthe Cosmic Genome Projectâ), the worldâs largest digital map of the Universe. The public was asked to perform a simple visual classification of about a million galaxies. The response was overwhelming, over 100,000 people participated, and created 40 million classifications. The results were on par with a similar, but much smaller scale effort made by professional astronomers. The level of enthusiasm resulted in thousands of blogs by video gaming communities - the participants were thrilled by able to help in doing real, meaningful science. In December 2007, a Dutch physics teacher noticed an irregularity near one of the galaxies, and published a blog about the object (Yanniâs Voorwerp). Her observation produced a truly unique, original discovery, and the object was since confirmed by the worldâs largest telescopes and space observatories (Lintott, 2008).
ICT has dramatically transformed how scientific disciplines pursue their work - it can and should be similarly transformative for learners at all levels, from K to grey. Forging the links between these transformations and better integrating research and education is our challenge. Technologies that allow interaction with scientific data, visualizations, remote and virtual laboratories, and human expertise offer opportunities for new research & broad implementation, particularly for STEM disciplines. Apple iPhone app store & Open Google Android apps platform a hint of whatâs to come. Promoting bridging of desktop and mobile technologies and informal and formal learning has special promise. In addition, teachersâ professional development should be supported through training programs, professional societies, and ongoing collaboration on the creation of new educational materials.
One of the biggest impacts of CL will be insights deriving from the vast data these systems will produce. Opportunity to collect & use & analyze massive amounts of data in measuring the effectiveness of new educational tools and methods - and in putting in place feedback mechanisms for improvement. Educational technology research funding has typically been funded based on small-scale, pre-network assumptions about development, deployment and scale. Cyberinfrastructure has the potential to change the education sector as much as it has changed finance, advertising, commerce, and medicine -- through the possibility of building on shared platforms, taking advantage of network effects, and instituting feedback mechanisms that lead to improvement. The figures below are learning curves generated from an open repository of learner data [1] collected during student use of an intelligent tutor for Geometry. These learning curves show a change in student error rates (the y-axis) over successive opportunities to practice and learn (the x-axis) in attempting to apply a geometry concept (e.g., circle-area) during problem solving. The red line shows average student data and the blue line shows predictions from a best-fitting cognitive-psychometric model. Notice how for the circle-area and trapezoid-area concepts, the student average error rate is initially quite high, but with practice and tutoring it improves. In contrast, the learning curves for square-area and rectangle-area indicate that students have little trouble right from that start (less than 10% error rate), but nevertheless get lots of practice (10 opportunities). Given such visualizations, it is not hard for one to conclude that a redesign is needed to reduce the unnecessary over-practice on some concepts and instead spend the valuable instructional time where it is needed. Just such a redesign was done and compared to the original version in a randomized controlled classroom study (Cen, Koedinger & Junker, 2007) that ran inside the technology and was essentially invisible to students and teachers. The results indicated a significant 20% savings of student time without any loss in learning, transfer, or retention outcomes. [1] The Pittsburgh Science of Learning Centerâs DataShop can be found at learnlab.web.cmu.edu/datashop.
Instill a âplatform perspectiveââshared, interoperable designs of hardware, software, and servicesâinto NSFâs cyberlearning activities. This is a new worldview against a prior history of developing applications distributed through CDs or installed on client computers. An effective platform should incorporate promising innovations arising out of industry as well as from newly funded technology projects and offer fully tested and supported modules for use in classrooms. It should ensure that learning materials targeted for the platforms are widely useable and remain useable over time. The ongoing evolution of platform designs should be guided by an expert panel of public and private sector participation. Big issue - reduplication avoidance. 10-20 or more learning management systems in use on many campuses!
Open source Elgg social media platform Class X â explain intent and new features and open courseware aims. Short videos â easy capture, zoom in, cleanup graphics, navigate by slides; learning communities around challenging moments in videos; embedded assessments; classtime for focused interaction.
Image: CENSEI is a cyberlearning project that builds the necessary scaffolding to allow students to use the same sensor data that scientists are using to learn about general scientific concepts as well as fundamentals of handling and using data, through in-classroom activities and online activities.
The use of cyberlearning technologies also introduces specific issues that require prompt action. For example, policies can play a role in guaranteeing open educational resources are truly open & available for future use. We made aggressive recommendations that materials funded by NSF should be made readily available on the web with permission for unrestricted reuse and recombination using Creative Commons licenses. Copyright has limited broad exploitation of developing innovations and restricted their being made into re-usable components that could form new capabilities to advance learning. EXTRA Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual-property license that permits their free use or customization by others. Open content includes video, multi-media, and cognitive tutoring courses, open text books, journals, books, data, laboratories, music, library collections, lesson plans, simulations, games, virtual worlds, and so on. Other OER include freely usable and reusable tools to support open content including open source content and learning management systems, search engines, communication systems and intellectual property licenses. Major institutions such as the BBC, the US public television stations, and Harvard University are unlocking their resources from behind passwords, intranets, and archives and figuring out ways of making them available to everyone, everywhere. But, it is the freedom to share, improve through rapid feedback loops from users and other experts, reprint, translate, combine, or adapt them that makes OER educationally different from those that can merely be read online at no cost. Three OER examples are 1) the OpenCourseWare activities that have spread across the world and receive multi-million visits monthly, 2) open textbooks to address the very high price of texts, the lack of quality in many of them, and the scarcity of them in many developing nations, and 3) open full courses in mathematics, engineering and science.
NO time for details!! The University of Queensland Inverted Pendulum Remote Laboratory - UQ was struggling to provide adequate access for students required to take a control theory course in their undergraduate program. Physical space limited class size to 60 students. Additional lab space was unavailable, & course content was challenging and uninspiring. Take the classic inverted pendulum control experiment. The student attempts to balance a pendulum with the weighted arm pointing upright towards the ceiling rather than hanging towards the floor. Students first write a Simulink model for the experiment and then write a MatLab program to control the motor that swings the pendulum, giving feedback from two sensors in the pendulum arm. Students work in teams of four to iteratively attempt to balance the pendulum via their MatLab application. Prior to the introduction of the iLabs pendulum implementation 5% of the teams balanced the pendulum by the end of the five-week experiment, while spending 50 contact hours on the task. The ilabs Inverted Pendulum made the experiment accessible beyond lab hours. The iLabs software interface presented the data graphically and via a mixed media video cam overlaid with a data driven animation of the pendulum arm. This let students see the results of one experimental run directly compared to another - thus showing the impact visually that their code revisions caused. But the learning story is more compelling. Students ran 30-40 experiments per team in the 5-week period prior to iLabs. With the remote lab students ran 3,210 experiments or on average 39.1 experiments per student. Contact hours decreased to four per week in the iLabs implementation from 10 hours per week previously, while the success rate for students balancing the pendulum went from 5% to 69.5%. Class size was increased from 60 students to 84 students while student ratings of the course rose significantly.
Perhaps most importantly the NSF directorates need to recognize cyberlearning as a pervasive NSF-wide strategy by funding the development of resources that can be used for both research and education. Take responsibility for sustaining NSF-sponsored cyberlearning innovations. Educational materials and learning innovations need to flourish beyond the funding of a grant. They can be maintained and extended across NSF divisions and through partnerships with industry, professional organizations, foundations and other institutions. Other recommended participants and related organizations include: Educause, which is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. MacArthur Networks, which are interdisciplinary research networks, "research institutions without walls," addressing a variety of topics. The MacArthur Foundationâs  âDigital Media & Learningâ effort to fund research and innovative projects focused on understanding the impact of the widespread use of digital media on our youth and how they learn. From the report: Institute processes and mechanisms for sustaining innovations, so that educational materials developed by grantees will continue to have impact long after Foundation support has ended. Implement effective hand-off and partnership programs so that valuable innovations remain in use and can be built upon. These programs should consider the role of industry, professional organizations, and other potential contributors. Coordinate cyberlearning activities across all of the NSF divisions to ensure that cross-fertilization â rather than duplication â of efforts occurs. Empower a blue-ribbon panel/board to oversee these activities. Convene a standing panel of experts from across sectors and charge them with the responsibility to define, explore and take responsibility for maintaining the aforementioned cross-sector partnerships for cyberlearning.
⢠Suggest several areas of strategic priority for the near future, among others we discussed last month in a new NSF Cyberlearning and Work Force Development Advisory group (2010) ⢠Open platform: OER culture has hit critical mass; new devmts could enable easy HD mini-lecture and slide capture (15 mins) and student learning community features that could be integrated with discovery services and integration tools so that faculty could add associated open-source Java, Flash, etc simulations, models and adaptive problem engines and assessments.
Martin Kempâs book on Visual Arts in Sciences â a Nature magazine feature for many years NRC book documenting many examples of arts and design contributions to innovations in information technologies and computer science Kenneth Robinsonâs UK interdisciplinary commission on educating for creativity (1999) â All our Futures
March 5, 2010 Release of the Obama Administration National Educational Technology Plan - Establish the purpose and focus of the NETP - Brief you on key elements of the NETP - goals, recommendations, & actions for transforming American education
Four major differences of previous plans: First focus outside schools â the whole ecology of learning environments, and beyond K-12 to lifelong learning. 2. Focus on transformative system-wide redesign and on processes of continuous improvement 3. Emphasis on applying the advanced technology available in our daily lives to student learning and our entire education system in innovative ways that improve designs, accelerate adoption, and measure outcome 4. Strong scientific research base.
From COMMON TO PERSONALIZED LEARNING experiences â âAll students should have common core discipline-specific learning experiences in preparation for college and careers. Networked technologies offer vast opportunites for group and individual learning experiences that are driven by studentsâ interests. LONG TAIL learning.
INFRASTRUCTURE
Grand Challenge Problems: In computing, in environment sciences, in health sciences âŚ. We need our own GCPs at the intersection of developments in cyberinfrastructure, learning sciences, and STEAM education.
Today, we have examples of systems that can recommend learning resources a person might like, learning materials with embedded tutoring functions, software that can provide UDL supports for any technology-based learning materials, and learning management systems that move individuals through sets of learning materials and keep track of their progress and activity . What we do not have is an integrated system that can perform all these functions dynamically while optimizing engagement and learning for all learners . Such an integrated system is essential for implementing the individualized, differentiated, and personalized learning called for in this plan.
The multiple-choice tests used in nearly all large-scale assessment programs fail to meet the challenge of capturing some of the most important aspects of 21st century expertise and competencies. Past attempts to measure these areas have been high in cost and limited in their reliability. Promising R&D applying technology to each of these components of the grand challenge are ongoing, but the pieces have yet to be integrated into a single system that is applicable across content domains and cost-effective to implement. To meet the education and productivity goals articulated in the NETP, learners and their parents, educators, school and district leaders, and state and federal policymakers must use timely information about student learning and financial data to inform their decisions. Today, these data are maintained in a variety of digital formats in multiple systems at local and state levels. As the processes of learning, assessment, and financial management and accounting move into the digital realm, educational data systems and educational research has become data-intensive and complex in scale, heterogeneity, and requirements for privacy. Still, we must create systems that capture, curate, maintain, and analyze educational and financial data in all scales and shapes, in near time, from all venues in which learning occurs: school, home, and community. This must be done fully consistent with privacy regulations.