Designing Learning Technology

Mon, 30 Sep 2002

Radio post #116
An article in the Boston Globe raises questions about Maine's huge investment in laptops for every seventh and eighth grader, pointing to a study that claims that a similar technology investment in Israel led to a decline in mathematics performance. The article makes a good point that when assessing the impact of large investments in technology, we should consider the opportunity cost of spending the money on other things. The researchers cited in the piece suggest that the money spent in Israel, and also in Maine, would have been better spent on a proven benefit like reduced class sizes. That's a legitimate attack; here in the Seattle area, there have been several teachers strikes this fall, and one of the (many) issues that arose was that teachers saw their district spending lots of money to replace two- to three- year old laptops -- which still worked just fine -- instead of raising teacher salaries. However, I have two major concerns with studies that try to assess technology impact on this scale. First, evaluating the impact of technology investment without looking closely at how it is used makes no sense. Unless we know how the computers were used (or not used), we can't really understand whether the investment made sense. Was suitable software available? Did teachers have the opportunity to learn about effective ways to use the computers? Any study of the impact of technology really needs to look closely at these issues, rather than making blanket statements about the impact of computers. Second, technology changes of this scope need time before they are evaluated. Often it's assumed that as long as we give teachers an inservice day to learn about computers, we've provided enough training, and we can look at what teachers do during that academic year as the litmus test for the impact of technology. That's ridiculous. Researchers who work closely with teachers on innovative uses of technology have documented that it often takes two to three years for teachers to reach a comfort level with technology, and that learning continues to improve over that period. Even if teachers receive suitable up-front training with the technology, everything they do that first year is going to be new to them -- throughout the year, they will be figuring out how the technology relates to where they are in the curriculum right now. It is only in their second year that they have sufficient experience to start integrating technology use into their teaching practice more effectively. This suggests that any examination of the role of technology in learning needs to look closely at the specific nature of its use, and to study that use for more than one year.

@18.51 #

Fri, 27 Sep 2002

Radio post #115
Ed Week has a good summary of the implications of the No Child Left Behind Act, including several links of further analysis and news stories.

@18.02 #

Wed, 25 Sep 2002

Radio post #114
Wired has a story about a project that's making geographic map data available to the blind. A clever use of non-visual feedback to support spatial reasoning.

@18.49 #

Tue, 24 Sep 2002

Radio post #113
Looking for information about internet use in schools? Check out the NCES report Internet Access in U.S. Public Schools and Classrooms: 1994-2001.

@18.46 #

Radio post #112
Ed Week reports that the Department of Education is planning to remove years of research from its web site, in part to better align the site with the current administration's political stance.

@18.38 #

Mon, 23 Sep 2002

Radio post #111
The Departments of Commerce and Education, and the NSF, have compiled a series of visions, published as 2020 Visions: Transforming Education and Training Through Advanced Technologies, that provide a diverse array of views on how students, workers and life-long learners may learn in the future. The visions are solicited from a broad range of backgrounds (update: while backgrounds may vary, it's also worth noting that all but one author are male and there is virtually no ethnic diversity among the authors). The last vision (of the Last Teacher) presents a cautionary tale to remind us not to take the bubbly optimism of the collection -- many of which are highly techno-centric -- too seriously. Technology alone won't fix education. Didn't we know that already? Press release here; downloadable report here.

@21.07 #

Radio post #110
Sometimes small, well-focused applications can make a big difference. I'm recently started to use Consistency, a small application for Mac OS X that's designed to help you keep track of regularly recurring tasks that don't have fixed deadlines. In my case, that includes things like updating this blog. I don't have the time or energy to maintain to update this daily, and since it's not a daily habit, it's easy to forget to add pointers to interesting items that come across my desk. Consistency does a great job of helping me track tasks like these and reminding me when I'm overdue.

@20.45 #

Radio post #109
It's offical: A study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project indicates that more U.S. college students use the Internet for academic work than use the campus library.

@20.40 #

Tue, 17 Sep 2002

Radio post #108
The ESCOT project, an ambitious NSF-funded effort to design interoperable software components for math education, is now giving way to a new project called TRAILS, which is, among other things, trying to leverage undergraduate software design for K-12 education. The full press release on TRAILS can be found here.

@22.09 #

Radio post #107
Extreme measures: New Scientist reports that record companies are now sending out advance copies of some CDs enclosed inside sealed portable CD players, as a means to prevent piracy.

@22.06 #

Mon, 16 Sep 2002

Radio post #106
A lengthy Wired article on how Dartmouth College has moved to a completely wireless campus, and some of the impacts, both social and academic, of the move.

@23.18 #

Radio post #105
More ICLS news: online registration is now open! Early registration ends October 9. Here's the full conference description.

Learning sciences research explores the nature and conditions of learning as it occurs in educational environments, broadly construed. The learning sciences field draws upon multiple theoretical perspectives and research paradigms in order to understand the complexities associated with human learning, cognition, and development. The next international conference of the learning sciences will be held October 23-26, 2002 in Seattle, Washington (USA). A representative, although not exhaustive, list of the kinds of research studies to be presented at the upcoming ICLS 2002 conference includes: A full conference schedule is available at the conference web site. To register to attend the ICLS 2002 conference please visit: http://depts.washington.edu/cogstudy/ICLS.

@23.01 #

Radio post #104
Ricky Tang points me towards a fairly comprehensive collection of electronic journals within education research. The list is maintained by the AERA Communication of Research SIG.

@22.57 #

Fri, 06 Sep 2002

Radio post #103
The tentative schedule for ICLS 2002 is online. Early registration ends October 8. (The International Conference of the Learning Sciences, or ICLS, is a lively conference that draws researchers from cognitive science, education, computer science, and other domains.)

@04.34 #

Thu, 05 Sep 2002

Radio post #102
Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater: Greek officials can't distinguish between gambling software and video games, so carrying or playing any kind of video game in Greece is now illegal.

@19.46 #