I’m listening to Arlene De Strulle, Bruce Mason, Kimberly Lightle, Cathy Manduca, Darrell Porcello in the opening panel at the NSDL annual meeting.
Dr. De Strulle is talking about the report Fostering Learning in the Networked World: The Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge.
Highlights of the report:
- Crossdisciplinary approach – use
- Platform perspective – adopt & integrate with existing platforms – support
- Learning across the lifespan – achieve decentralization while retaining what we know about learning and education
- Promote OER
- Sustain innovation – build on previous work so that it has life beyond its own project
Cyberlearning – learning mediated by technology (formal ed, informal ed, brought together by networked computing and ICT). Think about life long learning.
We need to think about redistributing learning over time. Cyberlearning is not restricted by the constraints of schools. Not limited by time, location, formal-informal boundaries.
Arlene comes from a Virtual Reality background from the military and illustrates cyberlearning through examples. She’s using examples of virtual worlds, earth systems sensors providing real time data. One example shows a person explore a 3D model of climate change including historical data.
Example: interacting with a dynamic model of a virus as one million atoms interacting with each other.
Haptic table a tool that lets people who can’t see, you can feel the images. Assistive technologies allow people with learning challenges to participate. Virtual laboratory allow people to practice surgery using remote surgery tools. This allows people to practice procedures repeatedly without the consequencies of real mistakes. The future workforce will require that people have skills to use technology. University of Pennsylvania. The GLORIAD network is an optical network that supports cooperation between scientists, educators, and students. It is an example of cross-institutional networks of faculty and students through the use of collaboratories. This helps faculty members focus on educational issues. Science museum virtual reality allows students to become emerged. This is essential to create cognitive presence in the learning environment. Game-based learning is being used to train our troops. It affords tremendous transfer of knowledge and individualization. Research is increasingly showing the power of effectively designed game based instruction. Game based learning increases public engagement in science and policy. Next to LaGuardia airport there is a plot of land that is set aside for a park. They have created a virtual version of Second Life and have invited the community to help design the park in that environment. Part of the design decision is the discussion and learning about the science of water and land related to land use. New mobile small devices have been created that allow data to be gathered in remote situations and provide access to STEM content. Mobile technologies are a democratic device because they allow everyone to access to all kinds of knowledge and to participate in the discussion. It allows people to learn information about their very location, for example the tree that they are looking at. It also allows remote communities to easily communicate (e.g. classrooms around the world). Adler Planetarium lets students look through the best telescopes in the world in real time and report them to the scientists. Technology based learning allows learning and teaching to be tracked and evaluated. The use of avatars in virtual worlds is an area of major research. She pointed us to additional reports: Cyberinfrastructure for Education Workshop Series, NSF Cyberinfrastructure Vision for the 21st Century.
What surprises did you encounter implementing cyberlearning?
Cathy Manduca – Pedagogy in action. Implementation in the Geoscientists. Implementation as a library. The goal is to help teachers and faculty to make better choices about education. If teachers and faculty had more information and examples about methods in subjects they teach, they would make better decisions about which methods to use and the barriers to adoption would be lowered. They created a catalog of teaching methods connected to examples. That was widely used by lots of people, so they created a service structured as a library. People can draw from the library to embed them in their websites and contribute content. Tracking demonstrates people are using the resources. Interviews give evidence that the site has given them new methods and confidence to try them. The resources speaks directly to teachers and supports adoption of the technology. Pedagogies and actions. Their project highlights cyberlearning comment such as teaching with data, models, visualizations, and games. You need to treat it as learning (remember all of the standard instructional design issues). The design takes advantage of teacher motivation PBL where the problem is what I’m going to teach today and collaborative allowing. The innovation have been able to allow teachers to author web pages. Cloning allows you to copy content into your website
David Porcello (SMILE Pathway) targets informal education of science and math. Learning Sciences and Informal Environments, people, places and. It talks about 6 strands of learning: learners experiencing, exploring, participating, reflecting about science. Recommendations include: learning objects should have learning goals, be interactive, have multiple ways to approach and use iterative design. Front line staff need support to actively discuss questions for diverse cultural views. SMILE is a central place for hands on science activities. NSF is building a lot of tools that include lots of personal content, mobile access, and widgets. It sounds a lot like what we are proposing for the ODLMS. SMILE is creating tools and services to support these in informal learning. They want to encourage people to use the SMILE tools. Focus on the educator and their needs.
Kim Lightle – Middle School 2 portal patheways. Teachers, students, and policy that affects teaching at the middle level. At Ohio State, Serena Nair is working with students to design learning environments for students. Mary Henton is looking at the policy of how to change what happens in middle schools. At the MS2 project they have built a portal for teachers. They are using a Ning based platform to connect content important to for teachers to know about in a way that it is all based in the technology. As teachers are learning about systems knowledge they are in wikis, in forums, and blogging. They are becoming part of a virtual learning environment for teachers. Surprises: Kim is not convinced that the “Digital Native” actually exists. Kids can buy shoes. Example: many 21 year old teachers didn’t know . Architecture of participation. If you build it, they might not come. They are putting content in lots of places to people will find it: Curriki, Indigo. “We are “. Object centered sociality – when you build a social network, you have to have content to build it around. The more complex the object, the more gravity it has and the more discuss. They have 570 registered members. Objects that have attracted attention are about integrating technology. It is interesting what people are looking for. The average age of registered members has 15 years of teaching experience. We should focus on second stage teachers. That is where we should focus (teachers who have figured out how to manage and are saying, I need something more). People found about the portal through friends primarily. One size doesn’t fit all. CBANS – Concerns based adoption model helps you understand what the needs of teachers are at a given stage. A social network allows differentiation by allowing people at each level to congregate and help each other. Book: Daniel Pink a whole new mind. He talks about symphony and about stem. We should focus on creative aspects of stem, not recal. Design for the future, not the past.
Bruce Mason, Director of Compadre. It is a service organization for teachers and learners in physics and astronomy. They try to bring people together to learn and find new methods. One of the biggest challenges of running Compadre. He wears 3 hats: Faculty member – don’t like change, showing them really cool stuff they can do is cool, but it will take a lot of work to get them into their classroom. Developer – he helps develop resources, faculty members evidence that approaches work and the materials and plans to easily fit new resources into what they are doing. We need to bring the results of past educational research into the world of cyberlearning. A community of educators that focus on the learning is powerful. The idea of a platform is a big challenge. Just last week 2 publishers came with learning platforms, but they already have Desire2Learn at their college. NSDL member – we really need to provide these services, not just a library and content. More important is that we show others how to develop content and use the tools. This should part of our sustainability model.
Questions: The cost of higher ed has multiplied. New technologies are being laid on top of them all and we are being charged for them all. How will cyberlearning address this? The open opportunities to do new things rather than replacing or substituting. It is far more expensive to not teach well. How do you evaluate student learning while technology is changing so rapidly? Use stable measures of learning consistently measure each technology. Teacher confidence is impacted heavily by reading websites. What does participation mean? What are they getting out of the experience?
Posted on November 18th, 2009 by joel
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