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Report on the CILT-2000 conference in Washington DC:

Technology, Equity, and K-14 Learning

“Bridging the digital divide”

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Carolyn Gale (cgale@stanford.edu) SLL (Stanford Learning Lab)

website: www.cilt.org/cilt2000

Reporters

Ambjorn Naeve (amb@nada.kth.se)Centre for user-oriented IT Design Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)Stockholm, Sweden

• CILT's annual conference is a collaborative forum for leaders in learning technology research, K-14 education, industry, and policy.

About the Conference

• The unique format of this conference features speakers and workshops designed to foster community and innovation and to advance the learning technology field.

• The conference tried to take advantage of the proximity of the policy-making community, to address a number of critical policy issues.

CommunityTools

UbiquitousComputing

Assessmentfor Learning

Visualization& Modeling

Organizing Committee

Synergy

Marcia LinnNancy Songer

VanderbiltUniversity

ConcordConsortium

UniversityCaliforniaBerkely

StanfordResearchInstitute

Roy PeaBarbara Means

Marcia Linn John Bransford Bob Tinker

John Bransford Bob Tinker Roy PeaJeremy Roschelle

(postdocs)Theme Teams

• The conference participants will convene in Theme Team workshops to share important work to date, build a common vision of the current "state of the art," and identify critical issues for the field to tackle.

October 27 and 28, 2000 CILT Schedule

• These sessions will continue with in-depth evaluation of policy issues related to equity within the theme, and specific opportunities to plan funded collaborative projects in areas of common interest.

• Many recent studies document growing inequities in access to technical resources and the opportunities they represent.

Interactive panel Rethinking the "Digital Divide"

•  In this session, panelists will offer contrasting views of the challenges that underlie these phenomena and — with the help of conference participants — evaluate policy levers that may convert challenge to opportunity.

Panel Legislative Initiatives

in Technology and Equity

• How are federal and state governments responding to issues of technology and equity?

• In this discussion of new and emerging legislation and policy initiatives, a panel of representatives from the Hill, public interest groups, and state governments will offer important insights into the dynamics of learning technology policy.

Keynote Roberta Katz

CEO of Article III, Inc. and recent TechNet leader, high tech CEO, lawyer, and cultural anthropologist.

•  The New economy is the main driver of educational reform (the needs of the “knowledge society”).

•  Global competition is the main force. US students are not doing well enough (in relation to e.g. Japanese students).

• Silicon Valley CEO’s are important role models for success. They often did not do well in traditional school and have strong ideas of what needs to change.

•  Industry is willing to help, but realizes that it lacks the pedagogical expertise.

• Ongoing dialogue between industry and educators is crucial.

• Schools are not companies, but …..

Keynote (cont.) Roberta Katz

Special Session:

Jan Hawkins Tribute

• Emphasized a fun, hands-on approach to designing technology for kids.

•  Always listened to people’s stories, something we don’t do enough.

Breakout groups

• Visualization and Modeling

• Ubiquitous Computing

• Assessments for Learning

• Community Tools

• Synergy/Professional Development

Critical Friend: Allan Collins

Conference Synthesis

• Any intense learning experience should end with time to reflect on what was learned.

• Allan Collins (North Western University) will help close the conference by facilitating and synthesizing observations of where we have been, what we learned, and where we agree to go together—from here.

Alan Collins’ summary Assessment

• This is the sine qua non to address.• The standards movement

makes adventurous teaching and learning impossible in schools, except in a few pockets.

• Basic skills have captured the standards and accountability movement, because that is what we have the technology to test.

Alan Collins (cont.)

Assessment

• All the fine tools and systems designed for schools will go down the drain, as long as the current tests are in place.

• But you cannot replace them with nothing. You need something better.

• You need something equally objective that measures students' ability to solve complex problems, create designs and models, etc., in short: to do adventurous thinking.

Alan Collins (cont.)

Assessment

• It will take collaboration with real assessment folks, lots of money, and a concerted effort to develop tests that truly reflect what students need to learn for the 21st century.

• I think this should be the priority for this community.

Alan Collins’ summary Professional Development

• The kinds of changes required in schools to teach the adventurous thinking that this community wants are enormous.

• To make such radical change in teaching takes at least 4 elements:

• Visible models of adventurous teaching.• Principles underlying the models.• Guided practice. • Reflective community.

Alan Collins (cont.) Professional Development

• Video cases are really important with commentaries to help teachers understand the underlying principles.

• By studying videos, we can begin to develop a theory and a language for describing teaching.

• It looks like the kind of technology-based professional development program is now coming together (Indiana math program, et al.)

Alan Collins’ summary: Ubiquitous Computing

• There are many constraints that a computer designed for educational needs has to meet.

• It has to be tough, light weight, small, cheap, owned by kids, wirelessly connectable, have long life batteries, etc.

• There is a lot of brainpower working on these issues, but we still are not there.

• I think it will happen within the next decade.

Alan Collins’ summary: Equity

• Transitions are difficult

• As we went from an agricultural society to an industrial society, cultural patterns of interaction were broken. Crime and disease flourished.

•  We are going through a transition of similar magnitude (from an industrial society to a knowledge society).

Alan Collins (cont.)

Equity

• The digital revolution exacerbates inequalities in the near term.

• In the long term it may ameliorate many of the inequalities.

•  We must work to ameliorate the equity problems, knowing we will only have partial success in the near term.

Alan Collins (cont.)

Equity

• Probably the best strategies focus on communities rather than schools.

• Such as Community Tech Centers, Computer Clubhouses, Tech Corps, Computers for Youth, etc.

• More difficult to address equity issues around minorities in the schools, because the kids are so turned off and the structures so rigid.

Presentations

Modeling & Visualizations

• Making Thinking Visible: Promoting Students' Model-building/Collaborative Discourse in WISE.

• CyberMath: A Shared Virtual 3D-environment for Mathematics Exploration.

• Science inquiry in explorable virtual environments.

• SimCalc: Democratizing access to the mathematics of change.

• Participatory Simulations: Connecting Learner Experience to Computational Simulations.

The SimCalc Project Jim Kaput and Jeremy Roschelle

(http://tango.mth.umassd.edu)

• The Mathematics of Change is centrally important to living and working in a rapidly evolving democratic society.

•  Problems involving rates, accumulation, approximations, and limits appear in everyday situations involving money, motion - virtually any situation where varying quantities appear.

• Our mission is to enable ALL students to develop full understanding and practical skill with fundamental concepts of the mathematics of change in meaningful contexts, through a combination of advanced technology and curriculum reform.

SimCalc: Mission

• The SimCalc Project aims to democratize access to the Mathematics of Change by combining advanced simulation technology with innovative curriculum that begins in the early grades.

• Technology

• TeamSimCalc is a diverse, committed team of educators, developers, and researchers at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, TERC, Rutgers-Newark, San Diego State University. Univ. of Texas-Austin and Syracuse University.

Interactive tools for visualizing, transforming and simulating mathematical objects will enable every student to achieve deep conceptual understanding.

SimCalc: Technology & Team

SimCalc: Interactive Graphs-1

SimCalc: Interactive Graphs-2

Science inquiry in explorable virtual environments

Chris DedeHarward University

website: http://www.virtual.gmu.edu

•  How to use modeling & visualization (MV) with a generation already adept at interacting with compelling, but mindless multisensory forms of entertainment?

Science inquiry in explorable VR environments:

Addessed issues

• How to develop an understanding of MV in teachers and the general public, who see learning about science and math more as communicating a fixed corpus of “truths” than as an evolutionary process of collective inquiry and interpretation?

Science inquiry in explorable VR environments:

Challenges in collaborationfor Educational Researchers

• mathematicians and scientists to design MV curricula for student learning.

• teacher educators and teachers to adapt MV learning materials to a context of first generation content standards and flawed high stakes tests.

• policymakers, parents, and communities to evolve learning distributed across space, time,

and multiple media.

Partnering with:

Science inquiry in explorable VR environments:

Potential advantages

Distributed simulation:

• fantasy, challenge, curiosity, beauty, fun.

• collaborative construction and social interaction.

• reconceptualizing personal “authenticity”.

Multisensory immersion:

• skill development in authentic settings.

• cognitive complexity into sensory processing.

• bridging visual learners into abstract thinking, formal notation, and causality.

Science inquiry in explorable VR environments:

What are the MUVERs investigating?

• The potential of MUVE-based museum-related “participatory historical situations” to aid motivation and learning in science.

• How the design characteristics of these learning experiences affect students' motivation and educational outcomes.

• The extent to which museum-related MUVEs can aid pupils' performance on conventional assessments related to national science standards.

Project ScienceSpace:

Using Immersive Virtual Worldsin Real World Classrooms

Science inquiry in explorable VR environments:

Case Study

Science inquiry in explorable VR environments:

Entering the Chemistry Lab

Science inquiry in explorable VR environments:

Testing the water quality

CyberMath A shared 3D virtual reality environment

for the interactive exploration of mathematics.

website: cid.nada.kth.se/il

Ambjorn Naeve & Gustav Taxén Royal Inst. of Technology

Stockholm / Sweden

CyberMath

• teaching of both elementary, intermediate and advanced mathematics and geometry.

Goals: The CyberMath system should allow:

Means:• Making use of advanced VR technology.

• global sharing of resources.

• the teacher to teach in a direct manner.

• students to work together in groups.

• teachers to present material that is hard to visualize using standard teaching tools.

CyberMath: An avatar using a laser pointer

CyberMath: Finding the kernel of a linear map

CyberMath: Importing a Mathematica object

CyberMath: The generalized cylinder exhibit

Presentations

Community Tools

• Communities of interpretation within the Telelearning Professional Development Schools.

• The Internet Learning Forum: Fostering and sustaining knowledge networking to support a community of science and mathematics teachers.

• Community and Collaboration: Internet Environments that Connect Classrooms.

• The Shadow netWorkspace' Learning Systems Project.• Outward Bound: Preparing students for active investigations through rivers.

• Stone Soup:A Distributed Collaboratory Using Software Agents.

• Issues in Development of an Online Education Teaching Certification.

• Creating and sharing representations of scientific phenomena: Creating a video-based meta-exhibit

to connect informal learning centers and schools.• Conceptual Browsing with Conzilla: a context/content based way to handle digital information.

Presentations (cont.)

Community Tools

Sasha Barab, (http://ilf.indiana.edu)

The Internet Learning Forum

• Aim: to support a virtual community of mathematics and

science teachers, allowing them to share and improve pedagogical practices• Vision: of a community in which teachers can virtually visit each other's classrooms to observe and discuss approaches to teaching and to share artifacts.

• Research goal: to understand the principles for fostering, sustaining, and scaling communities of practice in which the value to participants of sharing their practice outweighs the "costs" of participation.

• Method: look at the variety of variables that impact the dynamics of the social networks through which teachers seek to improve and share their pedagogical practices.

Stone Soup:A Distributed Collaboratory Using Software Agents (Jennifer Robins)

• A collaboratory is an online community where members share ideas and digital resources.

• It is a type of digital library where community members build the collection.

• a collaboratory has three advantages over a digital library: • The interests of the community

determine the content of the collection.

• The collection can be built faster by the collective actions of members.

• The cost of the building and maintaining a collection

is distributed among the community members.

• The central challenge in building a collaboratory is achieving a critical mass of participating members.

• Critical mass is defined as threshold of individual actions that must be reached in order to produce a public good.

• For the collaboratory to become a public good it must reach a state where its value increases with use while the cost of its operation does not.

• In order to accomplish this, two strategies are proposed:

• Encourage pro-social behaviors within the collaboratory community. • Add value to the collaboratory every time members use it.

• These strategies are currently being implemented on the Inquiry Page, a collaboratory for K12 teachers.

http://inquiry.uiuc.edu.

Conceptual Browsing with Conzilla A context/content based way to handle digital information

website: cid.nada.kth.se/il

Ambjorn Naeve Royal Inst. of Technology

Stockholm / Sweden

Conzilla:

Design principles for Concept Browsers

• separate context (= relationships) from content.

• describe each context in terms of a concept map.

• assign an appropriate set of components as the content of a concept or a conceptual relationship.

• filter the components through different aspects.

• label the components with a standardized data description (metadata) scheme (IMS-IEEE).

• transform a content component which is a map into a context by contextualizing it.

Geometry

Mathematics

Algebra

Combinatorics

Analysis

Surf

View

Info

Context Content

Conzilla:

Conceptual browsing:Surfing the context

Context Content

Conzilla:

Conceptual Browsing: Viewing the content

Projective

Geometry

Algebraic

Differential Surf

View

Info

What

How

Where

When

Who

Projective geometry is the studyof the incidencesof points, lines

in space.

It could be calledthe geometryof the eye

and planes

Surf

View

Info

Geometry

Projective

Algebraic

Differential

Context

Aspect

Level

School

Elementary

Secondary

High

W H W

...

hat

ow

here

Aspect Filter

Conzilla: Conceptual Browsing:

2D-filtering of the content

Surf

View

Info

What

How

Where

When

Who

Mathematics

Conzilla:

Where is mathematics done?

Content

Clarification

Depth

Context

Science

Magic

Religion

Philosophy

Mathematicsinvoke

illustrateapply

inspire

Surf

View

InfoWhat

How

Where

When

Who

Conzilla:

How is mathematics applied to science?

Magic

Philosophy

Religion

Science

Mathematicsinvoke

illustrateapply

inspire

Content

Clarification

DepthContextualize

Context

A is true

Science

assumption

conditional statement

logical conclusion

B is true

If A were truethen

B would be true

Mathematics

Magic

Philosophy

Religion

Science

Mathematicsinvoke

illustrateapply

inspire

experimentFalsification of assumptions

by falsification of their logical conclusions

fact

Presentations

Assessment

• Equity Impacts from Formative Assessment Using a Classroom Communication System (CCS) in 3rd through 5th Grades.

• Gauging Cooperative Learning in the Virtual School: Positive interdependence in Computer-Mediated Group Science Projects.

• Using 'Knowledge Forum' to Develop Argumentation Skills.• Engagement, Assessment & Epistemological Reconciliation in a Technology-Supported Learning Environment.

• On-line Assessment in Teacher Certification Programs.

• Assessment of Metacognitive Skill within a Scaffolded Learning Environment.

• Digital Portfolios: A Richer Picture of Student Achievement.

• Are We Working Together? Using Handhelds to Assess Student Collaboration.

• Bridging the Digital AND Education Divides.

Presentations (cont.)

Assessment

• Assessing Multimedia-Supported Project-Based Learning: Exploring the Social Life of Rubrics.• Causal Influence Diagrams as Pedagogical and Assessment Tool.• Objectively Assessing Student Problem-Solving with Technology.• Supporting Assessment-Intensive Pedagogy: The Design of INFACT -- the Interactive Networked Facet-based Assessment Capture Tool.

• Different Approaches to Online Assessment of Students' Web Research Skills.

Presentations (cont.)

Assessment

• Mobile Inquiry Technology Project.

• The Construction Kit Construction Kit.

• Palms to Support Students' Science Learning in Inquiry-Based Classrooms.

• Value and status of ubiquitous classroom tools.

• Kids And PalmS (KAPS).

Presentations

Ubiquitous Computing

• Interactive Video Network, A Missed opportunity.

• Grabbing Hold: Teachers as their own Internet Service Provider.

• Report from the Workshop to Integrate Computer- based Modeling and Scientific Visualization into K-12 Teacher Education Programs.

• InTime: A PT3 and Renaissance Group Project.

• Hands On Physics: Assessment in a Pilot of two units, Magnetism and Motion.

Presentations

Synergy/Professional development

• Online Learning: The LearnFromUs Project.

• Visualization and Model-based Reasoning Using Groundwater Computer Models: Science Teacher Protocols.

• Teaming as a Means to Sustainability.

• State Policies Matter: In-service Teacher Professional Development in Technology.

Presentations (cont.)

Synergy/Professional development