Pea Speech | Cuban Speech | Audience Questions | Home
Sections:
Introduction
Radical Innovation
Bridging School and World
Learners Producing and Publishing Knowledge
Establishing New Learning Communities
Revitalizing the Teaching Profession Itself
Technology as a Lever
Technology Concerns
Thanks very much and I'm glad to join my colleague, Larry Cuban, today for these discussions and all of you out there in the audience that I'm sure have been thinking a lot about this topic as well. Educational technologies really include any resources, such as methods, tools, or processes that are used for handling any activities involved in education. In this sense, then, the presence of a teacher, books, physical materials like alphabet blocks, display media like chalkboards and overheads, techniques of lectures or hands-on labs themselves, even the use of assessments, are all education technologies. But in practice this phrase has been used since World War II with a more restricted meaning of technologies like filmstrips, slide projectors, language labs, audiotapes, radio, and television. Since personal computing arrived in the early '80s, the phrase "education technologies" has come to refer more to computer-based learning, later to the use of interactive videodiscs and, more recently, CD-ROMs, and within the past 2 years, to learning environments established with computer and communication technologies such as the Internet and the World Wide Web.
In short, "education technologies" is a phrase commonly used to refer to whatever the most advanced technologies available are for teaching and learning in a particular era. As I'm sure Larry and I will agree, there are enormous nuances to hypotheses and evidence concerning roles of technology in learning. We can take up questions about that, but there's a big idea we shouldn't miss, like the fish who doesn't know about water, since he's in it. Throughout history, humans have invented technologies that radically change what they're able to see, do, and think about over significant time scales. Microscopes-medicine-health; the printing press-books-literacy and news-we've used technologies to craft new environments in which we live, which then change human life by changing what we do in fundamental ways, and even what we think about what humans are. Consider artificial intelligence and biotechnology efforts such as the human genome project.
In this context, I see a redefining of the very roots of learning and education underway with new computing and communications tools. Education in the context of such societal transformation as this should not be "business as usual," only making the learning of the past achieved through greater efficiency. For example, technology is changing the "what" of learning by introducing new concepts, techniques, and tools for understanding and also making the world-for inquiry, design, creative expression. These innovations include computer-aided design, simulations of physical systems that model climate change, the origins of the universe, or ecosystem population dynamics, as well as new ways to visualize and integrate data and to carry out radically new forms of inquiry that weren't possible until recently. New computer tools for supporting learners and their naïve understandings of rate of change are providing foundations to learning calculus as early as late elementary and middle school. Microworlds provide children in these early years with understandings of Newtonian mechanics and about sensors and graphing and feedback in complex systems. In addition to shifting the time and place of learning through wide-area networking, new participants in on-line communities are also learning from one another across school and age boundaries, including scientists, scholars, parents, and senior citizens. Yet technology in and of itself is not a panacea for education and its applications can surely be misguided. Computers and communication technologies are clearly not solutions alone, nor do they automatically foster utopias. Think of pencils and paper and you can see the same thing would apply. It's crucial to recognize that all such tools are mediated in whatever effects they have by human goals and activities. Technologies can carry or promote virtually any value system into the classroom, including outmoded methods of instruction. And, of course, it takes more than computers and Internet access per se to improve education. We can get beyond that.
There's also an endless list of reasons that challenge the wisdom of using technology in classrooms. In an already stressed schedule, it's hard for teachers to learn to sift through what's available out there, much less learn to use the good stuff effectively in support of higher standards. Hardware and software can all be expensive and hard to maintain and quickly out of date. Terrible and retrograde games and drill and practice can be dominant forms and easy to fall back on. It's hard to gauge effectiveness or do cost-benefit analyses often because so many things change at once in computer-intensive learning environments. Too few teachers are using technologies for instruction now-about 20 percent on a regular basis, 50 percent not at all. Students have too little access to computers to make a difference, it's said-just a few hours a week. There is well-documented gridlock in the different interlocking parts of the educational system, so that only glacier-paced change is possible, some say, and well-documented inequities of access and quality uses of technology exist across income strata. These are important concerns.
Yet there are endless reasons why we cannot ignore technology in classrooms. Over the last 15 years, computers and their affiliated media and communication tools have become a fundamental fact of life in this country and throughout the world. They increasingly undergird how citizens and institutions work, learn, and play. They are ubiquitous in our living space and will become more so. The Labor Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, or SCANS, says that "Those unable to use technology face a lifetime of menial work." Such technologies are thus essential to education for the future and I argue that it's the responsibility of educators and allied disciplines to find designs for their effective use or fall drastically out of step with society. Furthermore, many aspects of these new technologies are exciting and empowering to learners, all learners, including increasing numbers of teachers, and there are truly good reasons to be hopeful that new designs for learning with such tools can improve education.
So if we're going to get on with it, what should we do? Where should we seek out inspiration for recommended uses of technologies in education as they emerge and change? What are the models we're beginning to sense for what works, what compels learners and teachers, what might offer breakthrough opportunities for increasing access to deeper understanding and more adaptive skills for all learners? On a more personal level, what motivates me to do this work, given all these challenges of doing so? I've been at it since about 1981, shortly after microcomputers hit the schools, and haven't stopped yet, but am finding it quite interesting, more so every day.
So I'll just give, since we have so little time and want to spend a lot of time in discussion, five very brief classes of examples that I find providing exciting reasons for bringing computers and communication technologies into K-12 classrooms. I'll capture them under five headers. I'll call the first Radical Innovation, the second Bridging School and World, the third Learners Producing and Publishing Knowledge, the fourth Establishing New Learning Communities, and the fifth Revitalizing the Teaching Profession Itself.
On the notion of Radical Innovation, radical in its Greek sense meant "to the root," and I think that through technologies we can pose and answer basic questions that lead to fundamental breakthroughs in learning and education. For example, concerning who has access to learning and knowledge, it's a pretty fundamental question, and we're starting to see that model building and other approaches using technology in science and mathematics makes much more complex thinking and reasoning and understanding accessible to a far broader range of kids than ever before. And who creates knowledge? Not only adults, but precollege students in the kinds of research that they can now develop and publish on the Web and other places. And where and when learning takes place, increasingly, any time, anywhere. One heuristic we've used for innovation is to look at leading-edge transformations of uses of technology in society and the workplace, such as simulation modeling and the visualization of complex patterns of information, and also network-enhanced collaborative work. It's been argued that simulations and computer-based models have proven to be the most powerful resources for advancing and applying math and science since the origins of mathematical modeling in the Renaissance.
We believe we can adapt these developments for educational purposes in several different examples I'll briefly allude to. The first involves providing visualizations as a window onto complexity. In a project called SimCalc, Jeremy Rochelle and Jim Kaput have developed simulations that enable middle-school students in inner-city classrooms to outperform suburban high schoolers in learning calculus. In a second, in our CoVis project over the last 4 or 5 years, we've been using scientific visualization and geographical information systems with a broad variety of public-domain data sets from NASA and NOAA and others to enable students to pursue guided inquiries in earth and atmospheric sciences, with real-time weather data as well as archival data on climate and many other environmental and human variables. Another example in that general arena is from the humanities. Ed Ayers at the Institute for Advanced Technology and Humanity at University of Virginia is a civil war historian-historiographer-and has been doing work integrating textual and geographic, graphical, and auditory source materials for really detailed study of 10,000 people that there's a lot of information about in the Shenandoah Valley. All that separates the 5,000 in the North and the South is largely the Mason-Dixon Line. They have similar heritage. There is extraordinary detail from everything from letters to diaries to newspapers, birth records, and the like, and the kinds of inquiries that are possible not just for researchers, but for learners in this environment are quite exceptional. It's very different than a textbook experience.
The second group of examples is Bridging School and World. Designers of learning environments are often concerned about differences between classroom settings and the real-world environments in which we want students to apply their new skills and concepts. Schools have long appropriated real-world contexts sporadically in the form of field trips, labs, and work-study programs, but such contexts are rarely at the core of instruction. The Jasper Series at Vanderbilt has used interactive video and other technologies to address these problems of bringing real-world and simulation-based problems into the classroom. Each Jasper episode, and there are over a dozen of them, is a video narrative where the protagonist must solve a complex, multidimensional problem, things like rescuing a wounded eagle given rugged terrain, limited fuel, and an ultralight plane, or designing a safe playground or creating a successful business for a school fair, and in each of these cases, groups of students need to formulate problems, gather information, and use key mathematical concepts. Students' work in problem- and project-based efforts like this has been well documented as having considerable improvement in mathematical concepts and various other problem-solving skills.
A third general class of examples involves learners producing and publishing knowledge. Various projects are now using technologies to make continual opportunities for learners and teachers to engage in the cycles of producing questions, doing inquiry or design, producing works, receiving feedback, making revisions, and reflecting, that we know are central activities for learning. As an example, TERC's Global Lab project exemplifies a growing set of projects in which students from geographically dispersed schools interact over the Internet. Global Lab researchers examined various ways of supporting an international community of student researchers from over 200 schools in 30 countries who construct new knowledge about their local and global environments. They select aspects of their local environments for study, and using shared tools, curriculum, and methodologies, they map, describe, and monitor the sites, collect and share data, and situate their local findings into a global context. In participating in a set of 15 skill-building activities in their first semester, students begin advanced research in areas such as air and water pollution, background radiation, biodiversity, and ozone depletion. The global perspectives helps learners to identify universally observable environmental phenomena, including lowering of the tropospheric ozone levels in places where vegetation is abundant, dramatic rises in indoor CO2 levels by the end of the school day, and the substantial accumulation of nitrates in certain vegetables. Upon identifying significant patterns in their data, this telecollaborative community of practice comprised of students, teachers, and scientists engage in the most rigorous aspects of science: experimental design, peer review, and publication. Similar approaches have been applied within other subject domains, such as astronomy and language arts.
Fourth, there's a large amount of experimentation around establishing new learning communities. The notion here is to provide ways in which one might design and grow learning communities comprised not just of K-12 learners with one another, which is often a new thing in itself, but teachers with one another, and with scientists and other experts with teachers in everyday partnerships that engage parents, teachers, learners, and the community alike. As an example of some of these kinds of learning arrangements, Project GLOBE (which stands for Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment), involves many thousands of K-12 students from over 800 schools in over 40 countries collecting data about their local environments. Some similar properties to the Global Lab work but a major way in which it's different is that students submit their data through the Internet into a GLOBE data archive that's then used both by scientists and by students to perform analyses. There are visualization tools on the GLOBE site that enable students to see their own data, which is a highly motivating thing, in the context of that that's collected all over the world.
Fifth, technologies have tremendous prospects for revitalizing the teaching profession itself. It's become exceptionally clear from a number of national commissions and reports, and through many of your own experiences, I'm sure, that teachers are the crucial link for the success of technology in the classroom. No amount of good software and materials is going to work without substantial teacher intervention. And so the teacher is the crucial link and we've also now come to recognize how widely neglected teachers truly are in being supported to effectively appropriate and integrate for their purposes technology in relation to new teaching standards. The computer, especially with Internet connectivity to classrooms, opens up windows onto not just new digital resources for teaching, but social resources-teachers being able to begin to convene with one another-and I'll allude to several examples here.
The first example is the on-line TAPPED IN project (Teacher Professional Development Institute) that Mark Schlager and colleagues at SRI International are conducting, which I think at the moment has some 800 participants or so-many of them teachers, but also teacher professional development organizations engaged in a sustained conversation involving a variety of different ways of coming together around aspects of fostering K-12 science education reform in teacher professional development. TAPPED IN is a community-centered environment that integrates the best of current Internet communication tools such as email, listservs, Web pages and newsgroups, into a Web-based graphical, multi-user virtual environment that simulates and extends face-to-face, real-time collaborative learning and mentoring situations. Geographically-distributed teachers can meet and learn from one another via diverse levels of interactivity in a simulated graphical environment of a conference center building (a "virtual place"). Participants may have an office assigned or "built" for them there, and bring in various informational resources for joint review or mentoring with colleagues and others (such as text and graphic "overheads," class notes or plans, articles, Web pages). Whiteboards in meeting spaces may be written on, erased, and saved as meeting archives along with textual discourse that participants contribute to a meeting. Perhaps most importantly, in addition to TAPPED IN's provision of the technical infrastructure to support the TPD agendas and activities of each individual organization with which a teacher may be involved (such as workshops), individual teachers can "wander the halls" of the TAPPED IN virtual spaces, encounter other teachers, teacher professional developers, or researchers, that they may share their experiences with, and also utilize the broad palette of TPD resources and knowledge that none of the TPD organizations individually offers. They may link images (including 3-D objects using Virtual Reality Modeling Language), text, or web pages via Internet links to virtual objects in the virtual space of the TAPPED in on-line conference center.
In addition to this general approach, there are a number of different universities-Michigan, Indiana, Michigan State University-in which interactive video cases of teachers using different instructional and management strategies and working to foster student learning through project-centered inquiry in the classroom and so forth are being used both for inservice teacher development and for preservice teacher development to try to help provide a little more context than usual from the text-based and observation-based teacher development of the past.
So these are a few examples. We can obviously pursue them in discussion, but what are some of the large levers for initiating and sustaining the kinds of reforms of education that might foster the deeper understanding and greater readiness for lifelong learning that will be increasingly essential? I am a strong believer in the importance of computer networking as an access channel for reform of the kinds we're talking about because of the profusion of potentially useful educational materials and communications that broaden the opportunities for teachers and for learners, they need to be on the net. They need, of course, a lot more than being on the net, but it's certainly an enabling condition.
A second lever is the forthcoming major turnover of the teaching force. Of our roughly 2.5 million teachers in the U.S., the numbers I've seen suggest that we'll be having 2 million new teachers within 10 years. Planful partnership efforts, then, are going to be extremely important, that involve schools of education, that also cannot practice business as usual, and many of them are; professional societies that can better support teacher subject-matter knowledge, which is often a huge bottleneck for any of these reforms; school districts, unions, industry, and community. And this must involve new approaches to teacher professional development that continues after their initial education.
A third is revolution is needed in new forms of assessments. There's quite a bit of work going on, but it's a huge problem to provide measures of assessment that tap the kinds of performance and thinking that not only employers, but others in society want to see, not the rote learning that we often see current assessments carrying out.
And, finally, two other extremely important levers, both large problems: one is making school systems into learning organizations. The kinds of effective uses of technology in classrooms can't proceed very far at only a classroom level at a time. And, finally, far better and constantly improving curriculum to demanding standards, and we've seen only in the last few years with first the Governors' Conference and then the emergence of standards in science, mathematics, and some of the other subject areas, are the notion of standards and curriculum starting to rise to the occasion and meeting it.
Now I want to close and hand the baton to Larry by highlighting what I think are a few of the major and legitimate cautions concerning technologies in the classroom. This is just a list of some troubles; there are certainly others. A first and a common one is leaving teachers out. Initiatives for change that don't involve teachers as partners in rethinking educational practices and how technology might provide radically better tools are going to be a big problem. Teachers will continue to need sustained support. Believing that software will replace teachers is a frequent and mistaken conception, too. We have another thing coming-that's not what's going to happen-for the human agency of helping students make sense of the world given interpretations of their situated actions is always going to be part of good teaching.
A second caution is replacing flesh with silicon. The point here about technology is to augment physical, hands-on learning, face-to-face encounters, not to replace it, and yet, certainly, there may be places that come to feel that interactive programs, simulations, teleconferencing, travels in cyberspace, are cheaper, more effective, and easier to conduct than the real thing. Let's watch out for that. A third problem is a focus on improving the outdated. A great deal of technology initiative only seeks to do better the older forms of education, but the aim should instead be to do better things. Fourth, we should beware teaching the tools rather than using the tools for inquiry. No more computer literacy courses, thanks! The fifth problem I want to highlight is using the tube as high-tech babysitter. There's way too much low-grade use of computers now, running videogames and now aimless Web surfing without educational guidance. But I'd say, let's get past these problems and not sit still while the world passes classrooms by. I invite you to join with many of us in creating sustainable designs for learning that appropriately attend to the cognitive, the social, and the organizational aspects of technologies for education.
Back to Tapped In