Cyberlearning: An Endless Frontier for Fostering Learning in a

Networked World

Roy Pea

Stanford University

CyTSE 2011 — Berkeley CA

Plan

• Foreground big problems and needs

• Rare policy environment

• Why a focus on Cyberlearning?

• NSF Cyberlearning report priorities, recommendations and updates

• Links to the National Education Technology Plan

• Central issues for focused effort

Big Problems and Needs• A trickling STEM pipeline – and huge associated loss of

human capital from women, people of color and beyond

• Shortage of high-quality K-12 STEM teachers

• US STEM education: Middling to poor international scores

• Diminished STEM interest among learners

• Inequalities in technology-enhanced opportunities to learn:• Poor teacher ICT integration, lagging school ICT leadership,

Broadband network gaps - especially in rural America

• Only a small percentage of college faculty model innovative uses of ICT for STEM cyberlearning

• Outmoded HS and College Science Lab facilities (NRC)

• Un-coordinated and under-prepared cyberlearning R&D community

• Driven global competitors producing far larger % of STEM degrees and workforce-ready graduates

Policy environment

• New NSF Cyberlearning program (2011) • National Education Technology Plan (2010)• PCAST K-12 STEM Education report (2010)• ARPA-ED in FY12 Budget ($90Mil)• New common core math standards and shortly

new science education standards (2011)• Obama’s Educate to Innovate campaign (2010)• Exceptional public-private partnerships taking

shape (“Changing the Equation”- 2010)• UH OH….a new deficit reduction oriented

Congress with fiscal and budgetary crises nationally and most states

The Future of Cyberlearning: A vision of the year 2015…

School Home

Teachers Parents

Lifelong “Digital Portfolio”

Mobile technology access to school materials and assignments

Virtual interaction with

classmates

Learners

Supplemental content

Virtual LaboratorySimulations

Visualizations of real-time data

from remote sensors

What is Cyberlearning?

• “Learning that is mediated by networked computing and communications technologies” (NSF Cyberlearning 2008)

– Evokes cyberinfrastructure

– “Cyber” also evokes Wiener’s (1948) “cybernetics” — built on the Greek word for “steering”

• Cyberlearning = Learning in a Networked World, where the “steering” of learning can arise in a hybrid way from a variety of personal, educational, or collective sources and designs.

• Cyberlearning has the potential to transform education throughout a lifetime, enabling customized interaction with diverse learning materials on any topic.

Why Cyberlearning Now?

Powerful new technologies

Powerful new technologies

Understanding of how people learnUnderstanding of how people learn

Demand for solutions to educational problems

Demand for solutions to educational problems

New, more responsive methods of

development and testing

New, more responsive methods of

development and testing

NSF funding for interdisciplinary programs

in cyberlearning

NSF funding for interdisciplinary programs

in cyberlearning

CyberlearningCyberlearningCredit: John Sondek,University of North Carolina,Chapel Hill

Using data to teach geoscience thinkingCredit: Tracy Gregg

State University of New YorkBuffalo

Next decade of technology-enhanced learning opportunities combines…

• Very-low cost “always-on” networked smart mobiles

• Elastic cloud computing

• Participatory media culture

• Increasingly open educational resources, tagged to learning standards

• More accessible open platforms for developing learning and educational tools to be used by learners 24/7

• Ubiquitous sensors (GPS+) and location-aware services for learning-in-the world

• Increasingly accessible data visualization

• Immersive worlds and games – for learning, too

• Social networks used for learning and education

Youth are (mostly) wired and ready for tomorrow’s education

Pew Internet & American Life Project (December 19, 2007)

• 93% of 12-17 yr old teens use the Internet

•64% of online teens are generating new media content

• 39% of online teens share online their own artistic creations, photos, stories, or videos

• 28% have created their own online journal or blog

• 27% maintain personal webpages

• 33% create or work on webpages or blogs for others

• 26% remix content they find online into their own creations

Digital divide patterns being reversed with smartphone

adoption rates

What’s enabled these changes?

Pervasive information and computing technologies including mobile devices, connected with networks (cell, wi-fi, wired…)

Web technologies enabling people to share, access, publish—and learn from—online content and software, across the globe.

Convergence: Professional tools such as desktop and laptop computers have begun merging with personal technologies - mobile phones, PDAs, music players, digital video recorders, digital cameras, televisions (e.g., Apple TV, Google/Intel TV)

Networked content today provides a rich immersive learning environment incorporating accessible data using colorful visualizations, animated graphics, interactive applications - Not only “classroom content” – books and videos.

Cultural change: participatory culture, open resources, sense of a “digital commons” to contribute to and benefit from

Harnessing Collective Intelligence: A new ‘digital commons’ for

learning

• Hyperlinking: web users’ collective activity connects web pages

• Google's PageRank uses web link structure for better search results

• Yahoo’s directories serve as portal to collective work of web users

• Tagging helps others find resources such as photos (Flickr), bookmarks (Del.ic.ious), blogs (Technorati), videos (YouTube)

• Amazon’s science of user engagement leads sales with “human flow” measures around products

• Recommendation engines based on user input help iTunes sell songs, Amazon sell books, Netflix rent movies

• A “long tail” for learning resources whatever your intersts

Emerging learning environment properties

• Fast growing “participatory culture” engaging youth:

• “a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is know by the most experienced is passed along to novices” (Jenkins, 2006)

• Fueled by “software-as-services” (SAS) platforms - Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, blogs, Youtube, Flickr, social bookmarking, Google Apps from Gmail to Gdocs to GVoice

• Driven by social networking applications like Facebook (630+ Mil users)…and other communication tools such as SMS texting)

• On-demand learning resources sought out via search engines

• Increasingly pervasive, increasingly mobile:

• In 2015, 1 billion new smart phones bought globally will enable web searching and multimedia communications - for under $50

“In class I have to power down’

“In class I have to power down’

Lev S. Vygotsky (c. 1930)

“The central fact about our psychology

is the fact of mediation” (Vygotsky, 1933/1982, p. 166).

Centrality of Mediation in Cyberlearning

• Subject and object are connected directly, but also indirectly, through the mediation of cultural artifacts, as with written language and math. • But also: programming, diagramming, maps, art, and

including today’s virtual worlds and massively multiplayer games.

• As a result of mediation, human experiences — and how people learn —have evolved substantially in the past several millenia without evolution of our biological substrate.

“Sites such as MySpace or YouTube are more than just collections of pages or videos, they are communities of interest and in some cases are networks of practice. Shared interests provide a reason for people to come together, while networks of practice provide the technological means to share and create practices.”- Douglas Thomas & John Seely Brown, 2009, “Why virtual worlds can matter,” International Journal of Learning and Media

L.S. Vygotsky (c. 1930)

Cultural history in the moment of its making

• Part of what is exciting about this focus on mediation is that it provides the opportunity to connect cultural-historical processes to individual mental and social interactive processes in situated action.

• As Jim Wertsch puts it: "It is because humans internalize forms of mediation provided by particular cultural, historical and institutional forces that their mental functioning [becomes] socio-historically situated" (Daniels et al., 2002, p. 178).

Why is This Vital for Cyberlearning?

???

A Brief History of Technological Advances

Making Cyberlearning Possible

In principle, exceptional resources for human

learning and activities…

… will become continuously accessible through networks of information, people and services.

BUT

Do we know enough about learning over space and time — across formal and informal environments — to guide design of learning supports in the ubiquitous mobile computing future?

LIFE Center Purpose

To develop and test principles about the social foundations of human learning in informal and formal environments, including how people learn to innovate in contemporary society, with the goal of enhancing human learning from infancy to adulthood

Designed learning opportunities with curricula in school

(e.g. math lessons and

assignments).

Explicitly structured and guided with designed artifacts, environment features(after-school club, sport)

Outside curriculum: Emergent learning of social or cognitive content (e.g. leadership, gender roles, friendship)

Spontaneous and improvised, self- organizing (e.g. adolescent gaming friends)

Formal settings Informal settings

Formal LearningProcesses

Informal LearningProcesses

Complex relations of “informal” and “formal” learning

Roy Pea, Stanford University

Learning Ecology Framework (Brigid Barron)

• Unit of analysis is person and multiple life spaces

• A learning ecology is dynamic

• Subject to interventions

• Activities, ideas are more or less boundary crossing

• Influences: Lewin, Bronfenbrenner, Cole, Engeström, Lave, Rogoff, Saxe, Vygotsky

Framework has descriptive and prescriptive uses Framework has descriptive and prescriptive uses

Contexts of Contexts of DevelopmentDevelopment

Accessed set of contexts, comprised of configurations of activities, material resources, and relationships that are found in co-located physical or virtual spaces that provide opportunities for learning. (Source: B. Barron, Human Development, 2006)

Ste

phan

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ayla

Eli

zabe

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eth

Web hosting business, Chat-bot business: ••• online programming courses, books, robotics club ••• 7 years of activity

Cal

ebC

raig

AJ

Ale

xRobotics, Grow with me kit, consultant; Science Fair design project ••• online course, job with company, robotics club ••• 8 years of activity

Robotics, web design work, DVD business ••• Summer camp, school courses, online course, church ••• 5 years of activity

Playing Halo; spaceship animations using Flash, digital art ••• 2 courses ••• 6 years of activity

Photoshop art, games, movies, scripts•••web-design class••• 5 years of activity

Programming, music videos, short movies, blogs ••• Web design, programming, video classes ••• 1.5 years of activity

Robotics, digital art, blogs, video editing ••• Web design class, programming class, girl-tech club ••• 2 years of activity

Blog, learning C++, graphics design tool POV-Ray ••• programming class, online learning community••• 1 year of activity

*Source: Barron, Martin, Takeuchi, Fithian, 2009, The International Journal of Learning and Media (MIT Press)

Mapping learning activity across setting and time

CommunityCommunity

SchoolSchool

HomeHome

father

Learning partners

Case analyses indicate that most sustained learning projects have been aided by one or more learning partners, and that choices of learning opportunities often had dramatic consequences for expertise development – learning is profoundly social

Key Strategies and Opportunities for NSF

• Strategies for promoting growth of a cyberlearning infrastructure.

• Opportunities for action toward the greatest short-term payoff and long-term promise.

• Priorities and Associated Recommendations1. Develop talent and advance technologies2. Enable students to use scientific data3. Harness learning data4. Support broader audiences: Dual use for research and

education; large scaling by platform design5. Sustain cyberlearning materials beyond NSF funding

World of Warcrafthttp://www.worldofwarcraft.com/burningcrusade/imageviewer.html?/burningcrusade/,images/screenshots/,116,241,http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/burningcrusade/screenshots.html?14@27

Priority #1 Develop Field and Advance Technologies

• Strategy: Promoting new talent (programs, centers, training) and new technology

• Opportunity: Using technologies to: – Coordinate learning across formal and informal

contexts

– Connect students with remote and virtual laboratories

– Access interactive virtual or“mixed reality” environments

Ann Myers Medical Clinic in Second LifeImage credit: Scienceroll blog

Recommendation #1Build a vibrant cyberlearning field

• Promote cross-disciplinary communities of cyberlearning researchers and practitioners including– Technologists

– Educators

– Domain scientists

– Social scientists

• Publish best practices • Recruit diverse talents

Relationships Among Scientific Paradigms(Credit: Research & Node Layout: Kevin Boyack and Dick Klavans (mapofscience.com);

Data: Thompson ISI; Graphics & Typography: W. Bradford Paley (didi.com/brad); Commissioned Katy Börner (scimaps.org))

Priority #2 Enable Students to Use Scientific Data

• Strategy: Transforming STEM disciplines and K–12 education– New ways of looking at and understanding content – Preparing students for “computational thinking”

• Opportunity: Teaching students and teachers how to harness large amounts of data– Scientific research– Responsible use of data

• Information and communication technologies that:– Allow interaction with data, visualizations, remote and

virtual laboratories, and experts– Bridge multiple learning environments and technologies

• Support teachers’ professional development through– Training programs– Professional societies– Collaborating to create

new open access teaching materials

• Lifelong potential for learning, from “K to grey”

Intel Classmate PCPhoto credit: Getty Images

Recommendation #2 Emphasize the transformative power of technology at all levels

Priority #3 Harness Learning Data

• Strategy: Leveraging the data produced by cyberlearning systems– Teachers interacting with students and their school

assignments– Students’ educational histories

• Opportunity: Encouraging shared systems that allow large-scale deployment, feedback, and improvement

Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center’s DataShop: learnlab.web.cmu.edu/datashop

• Platform = shared, interoperable, extensible designs of hardware, software, and services

• Think large-scale (elastic web services) from the start, not scale-up from one to more classrooms

• Incorporate and support– New technological innovations – Fully tested modules for classroom

use

• Widely usable now and in the future

• Guidance from expert panel

Recommendation #3:Instill a “platform perspective”

Cumulative and integrative

• Why not do far more to make cumulative the technology developments we advance for STEM learning and teaching?

• Why not plan more for integration of multi-project R&D efforts?

• Example: Stanford Courseware, ClassX• Example: Stanford/Linnaeus (Sweden) LETS

GO Project and National Geographic Society Fieldscope

Stanford Courseware + ClassX

LETS GO and and NGS Fieldscope

Priority #4Support Broader Audiences

• Strategy: Create tested, customizable, open source materials– Refine materials for new audiences– Scale successful materials to larger

communities• Opportunity: Funding

development of resources usable for both research and education

WISE Project Customized for use in TaiwanProfessor Hsu

WISE in New LanguagesWISE in New Languages

Recommendation #4Promote open educational resources

• OER – a global movement to make high quality educational materials open (free) on the Web, with permission for unrestricted sharing, reuse and recombination, in all languages – all devices, and part of a growing culture of openness and sharing

• New NSF proposals should plan to make their materials available and sustainable

Examples of OERs

Open… CourseWare…courses…books…simulations…

journals… images…video lectures…games…textbooks…podcasts…lesson plansencyclopedias..heavens..portals

Efforts throughout world…

Vietnam, China, India, Europe, South America Africa, United States, Canada, Brazil, …

Universities, K-12 schools, libraries, publishing companies, governments, public television, hi-tech companies, museums, individuals …

Priority #5Sustain Cyberlearning Materials

• Strategy: Sustaining cyberlearning innovations beyond their initial funding

• Opportunity: Guaranteeing future availability of Open Education Resources

iLab Inverted Pendulum: Mark Schulz, iLab

SimCalc Projecthttp://www.kaputcenter.umassd.edu/downloads/products/technical_reports/tr1_1.pdf

• Maintain cyberlearning innovations beyond the funding of a grant

• Extend initiatives across NSF divisions and create external partnerships

Science

Technology

Engineering

Mathem

atics

SocialScience

BehavioralScience

Econom

ics

STEM SBE

Educational Initiatives

NSF

Industry ProfessionalOrganizations

OtherInstitutions

Recommendation # 5Sustain NSF-sponsored projects

Task Force Recommendations

1. Build a vibrant cross-disciplinary cyberlearning field

Relationships Among Scientific Paradigms(Credit: Research & Node Layout: Kevin Boyack and Dick Klavans (mapofscience.com);

Data: Thompson ISI; Graphics & Typography: W. Bradford Paley (didi.com/brad); Commissioned Katy Börner (scimaps.org))

2. Instill a “platform perspective”: shared, interoperable designs of hardware, software, and services

4. Adopt programs and policies to promote open educational resources

5. Sustain NSF-sponsored projects beyond grant funding with new partnerships

3. Emphasize the transformative power of technology

• Advances in cyberlearning technologies and the sciences of learning promise exceptional opportunities for transformative advances in learning for all.

Uncommon Times since June-08 release of NSF Cyberlearning Report

• Smartphones, iPad, and associated explosive growth of app marketplace (500,000+ apps across platforms)

• Emergence of the social graph (Facebook, Google), and social and real-time search

• Rapid cloud computing uptake and continued developments (e.g. Google Apps, Amazon, Microsoft)

• New Common Core Standards (Math, ELA), Science Standards in 2011

• Inspiring visions in the policy environment of NETP, PCAST K-12 STEM, Educate to Innovate

Strategic Areas for NSF and our fields

• #1 – Far more STRATEGY and COORDINATION - #1

• Open platforms for open STEM education resource development and integration by teachers, faculty

• Open “deeply digital” STEM courseware informed by learning sciences (and associated pedagogical models, assessments, professional development, educational data-mining)

• Physical and virtual places for learners to be inspired by and participate in STEM-rich institutions, and new virtual and remote labs (connecting to e-science)

• Comprehensive formal-informal STEM learning pathway architectures including gaming and social media approaches

• “Follow-through” on new Math and Science Standards

• Large-scale programs to promote universal computational thinking (e.g., Scratch, Alice, Android App Inventor)

And “STEM” is too limiting as a focus

• We need STEAM!!!• Arts (and Humanities and Design…)• As science and the arts have always

developed hand-in-hand

Key Messages• The NETP is a Five-Year Action Plan for Transforming

American Education, Powered by Technology

• Urgent national priority, based on a growing understanding of what we need to do to remain competitive in a global economy.

• A Rigorous and Inclusive Process

• Based on report of Technical Working Group of leading education researchers & practitioners, & input from tens of thousands of education leaders and the public.

• Five Goals, Recommendations and an Action Plan

• 5 essential components of a 21st century model powered by technology: Learning, Assessment, Teaching, Infrastructure, and Productivity

• The Time to Act is Now

“Transformation, Not Evolution”

• Must embrace a strategy of innovation, prompt

implementation, regular evaluation, continuous improvement.

• Programs & projects that work must be brought to scale so

every school has the opportunities.

• Regulations, policies, actions, and investments must be

strategic and coherent.

• NETP presents goals, recommendations, and an action plan

for revolutionary transformation rather than evolutionary

tinkering.

Informed by the Learning Sciences, Powered by Technology

• Advances in the learning sciences give us valuable insights into how people learn.

• The new recognition of life-long, life-wide learning ecologies requires new designs.

• Technology innovations give us the ability to act on these insights as never before.

“Broadband Everywhere”• NETP relies on

broadband initiatives funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009

• FCC’s broadband plan to accelerate broadband deployment in unserved, underserved, and rural areas.

NETP’s Five Goals

1. Learning “All learners will have engaging and empowering learning experiences both in and outside of school that prepare them to be active, creative, knowledgeable, and ethical participants in our globally networked society”

2. Assessment “Our education system at all levels will leverage the power of technology to measure what matters and use assessment data for continuous improvement.”

3. Teaching “Professional educators will be supported individually and in teams by technology that connects them to data, content, resources, expertise, and learning experiences that can empower and inspire them to provide more effective teaching to all learners.”

4. Infrastructure “All students and educators will have access to a comprehensive infrastructure for learning when and where they need it.”

5. Productivity “Our education system at all levels will redesign processes and structures to take advantage of the power of technology to improve learning outcomes while making more efficient use of time, money, and staff.”

1. Learning

• The model of 21st century learning puts students at the center and empowers them to take control of their learning.

• The model asks that we change what and how we teach to match what people need to know, how they learn, where and when they will learn, and who needs to learn.

• It calls for bringing state-of-the art technology into learning in meaningful ways to engage, motivate, and inspire students to achieve.

2. Assessment

• The learning sciences, technologies, and assessment theory provide a strong foundation for much-needed improvements in assessment.

• These include new and better ways to measure what matters, diagnose strengths and weaknesses in the course of learning when there is still time to improve student performance, and involve multiple stakeholders in the process of designing, conducting, and using assessment.

• This plan looks to technology-based assessment to provide data to drive decisions on the basis of what is best for each and every student, and that in aggregate will lead to continuous improvement across our entire education system.

3. Teaching

• Teaching today is a profession practiced much as it has been done for the past century and mostly in isolation. Transforming our education system will require a new model of teaching that strengthens and elevates the profession.

• Just as leveraging technology can help us improve learning and assessment, technology can help us build the capacity of educators by enabling a shift to a model of connected teaching.

• In a connected teaching model, connection replaces isolation, and classrooms are fully instrumented with 24/7 access to data about student learning, and analytic tools that help educators act on the insights the data provide.

4. Infrastructure

• A comprehensive infrastructure for learning that provides every student, educator and level of our education system with the resources they need is necessary to transform our education system.

• Its essential underlying principle is that infrastructure includes people, processes, learning resources, and policies, and sustainable models for continuous improvement in addition to broadband connectivity, servers, software, management systems, and administration tools.

• Building such an infrastructure is a far-reaching project that will demand concerted and coordinated effort to achieve.

5. Productivity• While investment in education is important to transforming education,

tight economic times and basic fiscal responsibility demand that we get more out of each dollar we spend.

• We must be clear about the learning outcomes we expect from the investments we make.

• We must leverage technology to plan, manage, monitor, and report spending to provide decision-makers with a reliable, accurate, and complete view of the financial performance of our education system at all levels.

• Such visibility is essential to our commitment to continuous improvement, and our ability to continually measure and improve the productivity of our education system to meet our goals for educational attainment within the budgets we can afford.

We should define and tackle Grand Challenge Problems:

Ambitious and funded

R&D efforts that support this plan

Grand Challenge Problems: History

• A grand challenge defines a commitment by a scientific community to work together towards a common goal - valuable and achievable within a predicted timescale.

• Predecessor: Hilbert’s 1900 address to International Congress of Mathematicians on 23 major mathematical problems to be studied for the next century.

• “Grand Challenges”: major problems of science and society whose solutions require 1000-fold or greater increases in the power and speed of supercomputers and their supporting networks, storage systems, software and virtual environments: • U.S. High Performance Computing and

Communications program (HPCC, 1991)Larry Smarr, NCSA Director, c. 1989

Cyberlearning GCP Criteria1) Understandable, with Significance.

Clearly stated compelling case for contributing to long term benefits for science, industry and society.

2) Challenging, and Timely.Hard problems within conceivable reach in 15-20 years with concerted coordinated efforts.

3) Clearly useful, in terms of Impact and Scale, if problem is solved.

Contributes to long term benefits for many people at large, and with international scope.

4) Metrics: Testable and Incremental.Can measure progress, incremental milestones.

Jim Gray: Director, Microsoft Research Lab, San Francisco

Jim Gray (2003). What Next? A Dozen Information-Technology Research Goals. Journal of the ACM, 50(1), 41–57.

Inspiration

Grand Challenge Problem #1

• “Design and validate an integrated system that provides real-time access to learning experiences tuned to the levels of difficulty and assistance that optimize learning for all learners, and that incorporates self-improving features that enable it to become increasingly effective through interaction with learners.”

• Integrated system should: Discover appropriate learning resources…

• Configure the resources with forms of representation and expression that are appropriate for the learner’s age, language, reading ability, and prior knowledge.

• Select appropriate paths and scaffolds for moving the learner through the learning resources with the ideal level of challenge and support.

• As part of system validation, must examine leverage gained by giving learners control over their learning pace & whether certain knowledge domains or competencies require educators to keep control.

• Need to better understand where & when we can replace the the educator-led classroom model with learner judgment, online peer interactivity and coaching, and technological advances such as smart tutors and avatars

Grand Challenge Problem #2-4 for new systems of

assessment, and for tracking progress on educational

productivity goals

Central Open Questions

• How to be more strategic across NSF, other government funding agencies and private foundations on Cyberlearning?

• What should be the relationship of NSF+ priorities and activities to industry developments?

• “Achieving the Nation’s goals for STEM education in K-12 will require partnerships with state and local government and with the private and philanthrophic sectors” (PCAST 2010 K-12 STEM Education)

• What mechanisms can we use to rapidly build the Cyberlearning Field and Community?

• e.g. Summer Institutes – public-private partner-funded – on university and industry campuses

Central Open Questions

• How can far more teachers be supported in technology integration within STEM courses for deeper student learning?

• Challenges of rapidly changing technologies call for new strategies and models

• Platform-based approaches for “connected teaching” (NETP 2010)

• How can educational system policies adapt more rapidly to the present opportunities?

• Examples: Mobiles and social media in schools, gamification of learning environments, FERPA constraints on teacher video sharing

Summary

1. Highlighted why cyberlearning and recommendations for the work ahead

2. Summarized sweeping changes in our technology environments and futures for learning and teaching as we advance how learning is mediated

3. Challenged us to develop theory to guide technology-enhanced learning across contexts

4. Reviewed key elements of the NETP: revolutionary, system-redesign, beyond-school

5. Suggested high priorities for open questions to tackle as a community soon

Draft March 5th, 2010

Final Release September 10th, 2010

Final Release November 9th, 2010

Final Release June 24th, 2008

Thanks for your attention!

roypea@stanford.edu