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Global resources for on-line education
Envisioning a research agenda for the future of technology and education
by
Beverly Park Woolf and Burton I. Woolf
The Challenge
Over the last 40
years, educational technology has been used extensively to replicate, replace,
expedite, or support existing approaches to education and learning. However, notwithstanding the pervasive
presence of computers in the educational landscape today, in most cases,
technology has effected only incremental changes in the fundamental way we
actually teach and foster learning. The
potential for technology to re-shape the very discourse and practice of
teaching and learning is still far from being realized. Education technology has not been challenged
to produce dramatic educational innovations that profoundly transform the ways
people learn, moving them towards life-long and life-wide learning, or
supporting learners to be fully active through inquiry, collaboration,
discussion, and practice.
Global Resources
for Online Education (GROE) is a two-year project designed to articulate and
propose a long range vision for these issues and opportunities, and to outline
a path for developing potentially powerful educational tools and
infrastructures through an intentional program of research over the next 20-30
years.
Who?
The GROE project is
sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Computing Community
Consortium (CCC)[1].
The project goal is to set a future vision for educational technology and to recommend a
research agenda(s) for Research funding of that vision. Dr. Beverly
Park Woolf (UMass-Amherst) is Principal Investigator for the GROE project and
Dr. John L. King (University
of Michigan) is the GROE
Project's liaison to CCC. As described
below, project team leaders are assisting in the preparation of topical papers
and reports. We recognize and thank Dr. King and the GROE
project team leaders for the contributions in content and editing that they
made to this article.
Approach
The GROE Project
is convening a
series of facilitated collaborative workshops in which leaders from several
disciplines -
computer science, education, psychology, public policy - engage in creative
conversations to investigate the role of computation and technology in
education. The perspective has wide coverage and extends from what is learned,
where it is learned (everywhere and at all times), how it is learned (through
simulations and virtual worlds) and how it is enabled (data management to
support learning processes and enable global studies of learning). Workshop
participants are identifying educational needs, outlining perceived challenges,
defining future impacts, and articulating a roadmap to achieve the results.
Prior to convening any workshops,
preliminary discussions, led by Dr. Paul Cohen (University of Arizona),
were held during the Fall Symposium of the Association for the Advancement of
Artificial Intelligence, November 7-9, 2008.[2] The first GROE Project workshop was formally
convened at Arizona State University,
April 23-26, 2009 for 27 invited participants from throughout the U.S.
representing a broad range of disciplines. A second forum was convened in Brighton, England
on July 4-5, 2009, where twenty participants (including participants from
Europe and Australia)
contributed additional comments, ideas and recommendations to the conversation.
Preliminary
Vision and Recommendations
The GROE Project
is evolving a vision of the future of education and a set of recommendations
that build on each successive participatory workshop we have convened, complemented
by comments we are receiving from the field.
Several of the ideas, visions, questions, concerns and recommendations
emerging from these conversations are described in this section divided into to
six key areas: personalizing education,
assessing student learning, supporting social learning, diminishing educational
boundaries, developing alternative teaching strategies and enhancing the role of stakeholders. For
each key area we identify the educational challenges and future visions, list
the key technologies that might be challenged to produce dramatic changes, and
then suggest opportunities for research and funding.
Personalizing instruction.
Vision: Learning
environments will personalize instruction to harmonize with students' traits (e.g., personality, learning
style, motivation and culture) as well as students' states (e.g., affect, level of engagement and level of
frustration). Technology enables
instruction that understands students' weaknesses and challenges, as well as
their motivational style (e.g., is a star, wants competition, needs peer
acknowledgement, seeks personal improvement). We challenge technology to
understand an individual as might a human tutor. (Team leaders: Kurt Van Lehn, Arizona
State University;
Bert Bredeweg, University
of Amsterdam).
Technology: Customized
instruction; user-models; intelligent tutors; gaming environments; adaptive
hypermedia.
Research funding should consider: (1)
Implementing advanced learning models that represent what learners know, can
do, when and how knowledge was learned and what pedagogy worked best for each
learner. (2) Developing machine learning and data mining techniques, including
algorithms that are particularly adapted to educational data - How do we manage
vast amounts of data, effectively store, make available and analyze data for
different purposes and stakeholders? (3) Developing simulations and
representations that explain themselves to learners- How do we address the
communicative interaction and use multimedia to switch modalities as
appropriate?
Assessing student learning.
Vision: Educational
assessment should have as its primary goal to improve learning and move beyond
the current "Teach / Stop / and Test" model.
Technology enables assessment to be everywhere and every time a student
learns. It will be seamless and ubiquitous and consistent with learning. (Team Leader: Valerie Shute, Florida State University).
Technology: Improving human
capabilities; building cognitive partnerships; developing instructional
databases and digital libraries; educational data mining.
Research funding should consider: (1)
Understanding the full complement of characteristics brought to bear in
learning - What are learning competencies? How do they relate and how do we
acquire evidence about them? (2) Fusion of assessment and learning - What are
new sources of assessment? How do they flow to, from and with learning, and how
can we tear down conceptual and practical barriers between assessment and
learning? (3) Rendering assessments useful to all parties -
Who makes what decisions? What information do they need, how does assessment
provide evidence for those decisions, and how to best communicate the
complicated results of assessment to each party?
Supporting social learning.
Vision: We can no longer
consider individual learners as acting in isolation. Social learning is
pervasive. Technology will sustain continuous learning by active students in a way
that is highly distributed and valued. (Team
Leaders: Daniel Suthers, University of
Hawaii at Manoa; Rose Luckin, London Knowledge Lab).
Technology: Distributed
cognition, learning communities, networking, collaboration, mobile and
ubiquitous computing to create seamless social learning.
Research funding should consider: (1) Supporting learning communities to
sustain, build on and share knowledge - How do communities interact and share knowledge
resources? (2) Addressing infrastructure (API, management) and application
level (representations) issues - How can we achieve more than just technical
interoperability and also support semantic interoperability? What
integrations/mashups of devices/platforms would more effectively support social
learning distributed across time, space and media? (3) Treating the social
group as a cognitive unit, but not to the exclusion of the individual - What
analyses are needed to relate the two?
Diminishing educational boundaries
Vision: Many artificial and non-productive boundaries
have been established within educational institutions that do not support
active learning, including place
of study (home, work, institutions), education level (school, college, university and professional development),
personal ability (special and typical
students) and type of learning
(formal and informal). How can we re-examine, cross, mitigate and/or
eliminate many of these boundaries? For example, mobile technology
and social networks provide seamless and ubiquitous learning across place of study,
educational level and type of learning.
Intelligent environments enable students to engage in learning at their
appropriate level. (Team Leader:
Emma Tonkin, UKOLN, University of Bath,
UK).
Technology: Wireless, pervasive and ubiquitous learning; accessing digitized artifacts anytime,
anywhere; virtual computing from many computers; augmenting physical space;
aggregating across all students; technical, physical and security
considerations.
Research funding should consider: (1)
Increasing opportunities for learning outside as well as inside the educational
apparatus- When does learning occur? How should learning outside of the norm
(e.g., at home and informally) be supported? (2) Developing tools
and resources for learning that are available across society. (3) Supporting
students to transition, transfer, apply, and enhance their knowledge,
experience, and discovery and imaginative inquiry across boundaries.
Developing alternative learning modes
Vision: We need new
teaching strategies to enable students to function in the 21st
Century. For example, students will need to solve complex problems in
innovative ways and think clearly about vast amounts of knowledge. They may
need to work across domains, collaborate with others and engage in inquiry reasoning.
These needs are more pressing than ever as citizenship in a high-technology
world requires scientific reasoning and disciplined thinking. Teamwork is
vital. (Team leader: Win
Burleson, Arizona
State University).
Technology: Rich computer
interfaces, intelligent agents; multimedia; learning companions; teachable
agents; detecting and responding to student emotion.
Research funding should consider: (1)
Developing resources to support collaborative inquiry - What is the process by which teams
generate, evaluate, and revise knowledge? Which tools
support learning of more complex, realistic problems? Which tools match
learners with other learners and/or mentors taking into account learner
interests? (2) Developing students' communication skills and creative abilities
as they become exposed to diverse cultures and viewpoints. (3) Developing resources
to support exploratory, social, and ubiquitous learning.
Enhancing the role of stakeholders.
Vision: As technology
becomes more pervasive in education, stakeholders (teachers, students, parents,
administrators and employers) will more effectively and consistently utilize it
as part of instruction and in some cases fully integrate it fully into their
teaching/learning. Stakeholders will trust educational technology to do what it
claims to do and be assured that students have absolute privacy. We expect
teachers to continue to be of primary importance in school environments. (Team leader: John L. King, University of Michigan).
Research funding should consider: (1)
Extending a teacher's significance to informal settings as well as formal ones
and increases their interactions with students in broader and more diverse
contexts. (2) Developing more tailored and higher quality information for
teachers to inform their decisions. (3) Addressing the historical imbalance
between children and teachers - Which activities and environments make
teachers' experiences as engaging and motivational and productive as children's
experiences?
Conclusion
The specific ambition of the GROE Project
is to push the frontier of thinking about education and technology, to speculate
about what is possible, and then to turn to the prioritization of issues and
implementation. This is a significant task
for which we cannot expect to include the full range of interests in the vast realms
of education and learning. Rather, our success
in achieving the broad objectives of improved learning will depend on encouraging
ongoing involvement in this conversation -either through the GROE project or in
other settings- of as many communities as possible, including teachers, students,
parents, and educational leaders, in addition to researchers and technologists.
We trust that our ideas and recommendations will motivate interest and
stimulate further conversations by articulating a set of grand challenges to be
considered, and by making suggestions of what technological advancement might
offer in meeting those challenges.
This article has provided an overview of the
discussions held during the first two workshops sponsored by the GROE Project. These discussions offer the beginnings of a
roadmap for an integrated approach to computer science, cognitive science, and
learning sciences research that addresses the high-level challenges faced in
developing learning technologies that are relevant to current and future
educational needs. This roadmap will be further embellished and refined through
additional workshops and forums (as funding allows), and by comments from the
field, including the input from members of the learning technology
community. For updates on our progress
and to download the most current release of the GROE Project report (a work in
progress), please visit the GROE page on the CCC website: www.cra.org/ccc/groe.php. Please
send your thoughts and comments to bwoolf@acad.umass.edu.
Beverly Park Woolf
Department of Computer
Science
bev@cs.umass.edu
Burton I. Woolf
School of Education
bwoolf@acad.umass.edu
University of
Massachusetts-Amherst, USA
[1] The Computing Community
Consortium is funded by the National Science Foundation through the Computing
Research Association to mobilize the computing research community to formulate
important questions facing the field and develop strategies for pursuing them.
[2] See garuda.cs.arizona.edu/iicp/Fall_Symposium
and icp.cs.arizona.edu/submissions
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