The Sciences and
Technologies of Learning
Roy D. Pea
SRI International
National Science Foundation
June 2, 1999
Overview

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Major advances in the learning sciences over past
several decades
Powerful interactive learning environments are
building on these developments
Defining and tackling the challenges of scaleup
and sustainability
How advances in computing and communications
are creating exciting opportunities to address
needs
An emerging nexus of technology advances,
learning sciences and educational policy
Revolutionary advances in sciences of learning

National Academy of Sciences “How
People Learn” (1999)

The nature of expertise

Development of concepts and
reasoning abilities

New pedagogies for deep learning of
complex subjects

Roles of teacher learning

New assessment approaches for
higher standards

Powerful roles for effective use of
technologies
Aspects of the sciences of learning
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The knowledge-intensive nature of expertise
Expertise is not simply general abilities nor use of general
strategies
Experts’ extensive knowledge affects what they notice and
how they organize, represent, and interpret information in
their environments

Expert knowledge organized in large coherent
frameworks

Experts notice features and meaningful information
patterns unnoticed by novices

Expert knowledge reflects contexts of application--it is
not reducible to isolated facts
Expert knowledge does not guarantee pedagogical
knowledge
The importance of representational
competencies for expertise
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Expertise often involves the skillful creation, use, and
interpretation of symbolic expressions (written language,
mathematical equations, graphs, technical diagrams, proofs,
computer programs)
Experts have greater meta-representational proficiencies than
novices—knowing which representational forms are most
suitable for asking and answering specific kinds of questions
Experts have facile understanding of the mappings between
different representational forms (e.g., algebraic functions to
graphs or numerical tables)
Experts are able to assemble arguments, designs, theories, and
other complex artefacts that are subject to challenge and testing
in a community of peers
The development of concepts
and reasoning abilities
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Young children rapidly come to make sense of
number, language, and causality
In their efforts to make sense of the world, children
form robust conceptions that may conflict with the
formal knowledge that is later taught (e.g., intuitive
physics)
The development of metacognition is a crucial aspect
of acquiring expertise and becomes a strategic
competency for learning:

Knowledge about one’s knowledge and its limits

Control knowledge about thinking and learning:
planning, monitoring, and revising one’s efforts
Contextual and cultural
influences on learning
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Participation in social practices is a
crucial form of learning outside school
and in school
The broad diversity of social practices in
different cultural contexts creates special
challenges for engaging students’ prior
knowledge in school
Learning is promoted by social norms
that value a search for understanding
Learning is assisted by the family and
social environment in which activities
provide opportunity for learning through
participation
From learning sciences theory to
learning environment design

Not a simple translation
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Physics constrains but does not dictate bridge design (Herbert
Simon)
The field of the learning sciences is raising important questions
and inquiries:

Rethinking what is taught
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Rethinking how it is taught for understanding
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Reframing how learning is appropriately assessed
Powerful examples of Interactive Learning Environments (ILEs)
that build on our understandings from the sciences of learning

SimCalc’s MathWorlds
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The Knowledge Integration Environment

WorldWatcher: Scientific visualizations for global investigations

Cognitive tutoring systems
SimCalc: Democratizing access
to the Mathematics of Change
Target:
Enable all students to develop full understanding and practical
skills with the Mathematics of Change and Variation, including
fundamental concepts of calculus
Age:
As early as Grades 5-8—against a backdrop of ~10% taking
High School Calculus, 1.5% taking AP Calculus
Who:
Collaborators:
Learning
sciences
Questions:

Jim Kaput (U. Mass, Dartmouth)

Jeremy Roschelle (SRI International)

Ricardo Nemirovsky (TERC)

Rutgers-Newark; Syracuse; San Diego USI
How can technologies and engaging learning activities change
the experiential nature of the Mathematics of Change and
Variation by tapping more deeply into students’ cognitive,
linguistic, and kinesthetic resources?
SimCalc: Co-evolution of technology
and MCV curriculum
1970’s
Compute within a
symbol system
One-way serial links
1980’s
Multiple linked
representations
(formulas, graphs,
numerical tables)
(e.g., function plots graph)
MBL/CBL: Physical
data collection and
symbolic
representation
Source: Kaput,
NCTM 2000
1990’s
New Big Three
The “New Big 3” for Learning the Mathematics
of Change and Variation
words
Coordinate
graphs
words
Numerical
tables
Coordinate
graphs
Numerical
tables
RATES
TOTALS
Symbolic
formulas
Symbolic
formulas
MBL/LBM
Source: Kaput,
NCTM 2000
PHENOMENA
Physical
Cybernetic
Abstract
MBL/LBM
SimCalc: Co-evolution of MCV
curriculum and technology
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Curriculum: With technology use in activities of
predicting, comparing, designing, build on student
experiences with
 physical change (motions, seasons, aging, growth,
flows)
 symbolic change (smaller numbers, steeper curves)
Advanced topics:
 Connections between variable rates and
acculumation
 Velocity, acceleration, limits
Contextualizes other mathematical topics such as:
 Slope, rate,ratio, proportion
 Areas of geometric figures
Example of a SimCalc activity
SimCalc outcomes
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Technology linkages between experiential phenomena and
mathematical representations become conceptually linked
in student’s mathematical competencies.
After a three-month supplementary course in MCV using
MathWorlds, students from the most troubled high school
in Newark NJ achieved near-ceiling effects on assessment
items that challenge university calculus students
Testing low-SES school mainstream Grade 6-10 students
indicated higher levels of performance after MCV
coursework than high-SES Gr 11-12 students taught
traditional calculus. They….

Relate slope of position graph to speed of a motion and
to the corresponding velocity graph

Infer total distance covered, given by velocity graph,
demonstrating accumulation of area under a curve
Now and Future SimCalc
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MathWorlds implementation in Java (Roschelle, SRI
International)
Incorporation of Java MathWorlds in ESCOT project
testbed of interoperable middle school math components
TERC’s LBM (“Line Becomes Motion”):
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To incorporate kinesthetic experience, students use
mathematical functions created on a computer to
control physical devices (like motorized toycars)
MathWorlds commercially available in Flash ROM on TI83Plus graphing calculators (Fall ‘99) and PCs (Key
Curriculum Press, Fall 2000)
Massive teacher development with NJ and Mass SSIs and
San Diego USI; T-Cubed workshops run by TI
KIE: Knowledge Integration Environment
Target:

Age:
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Who:
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Learning
sciences
issues:
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To promote coherent knowledge integration in
science learning that is reflectively and
critically used (versus unconnected facts and
beliefs)
Middle to high school sciences
Marcia Linn, Jim Slotta, et al (UC Berkeley)
and diverse scientist partners and
organizations
Expertise involves connected ideas and
models used for reasoning.
Do learners develop more integrated
understanding and models when they engage
in meaningful collaborative projects using
technologies that support key cognitive and
social aspects of scientific inquiry and “make
thinking visible”?
KIE Technology

KIE is a client-side front-end to the World-Wide Web
where student project activities are supported by:

SenseMaker: software that ‘scaffolds’ thinking and the
organization of critically-considered evidence in
scientific argument
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KIE Project units

An associated KIE Evidence Database
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Mildred the Cow Guide: a provider of reflect process
prompts (what to do next and how)
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SpeakEasy: net forum for project participants to share
issues

Written reflections and class discussions
KIE Curriculum
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Student teams work with and/or create scientific
evidence in three kinds of supplementary units (2 days
to 2 weeks long)

Theory comparison projects (e.g., dinosaur extinction, life on
Mars)
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Design projects (e.g., an energy-efficient home in the desert
using scientific principles)
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Critique project (e.g., science tabloid claims on energy
conversion)
Scientist partners (e,g., NASA Ames):

Post web evidence for pre-college science teachers

Suggest debates, critiques, or design projects for learners
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Mentor students using personal web pages
KIE Outcomes
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Students can be effectively encouraged to integrate
their knowledge through simple prompts for reflection
on their ideas (Mildred the Cow)
Students can develop well-formulated scientific
arguments
Net-based discussions enable more students to voice
their ideas about the science, especially girls
Major improvements in integrated understanding of
project topics such as light, heat, temperature, and
sound
KIE Now and Future
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Many of KIE’s nearly 20 projects have been classroom-tested
KIE has become WISE (Web-Based Integrated Science
Environment)
…and has spawned Project SCOPE:
Science Controversies On-Line: Partnerships in Education

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New NSF-funded effort (UC Berkeley, SCIENCE magazine, U.
Washington)
Will develop ‘controversy communities’ of scientists and
science learners, focusing on controversies that concern
leading research scientists and also connect to citizen
interests, e.g.,

World-wide control of malaria
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Evidence for life on mars

Deformed frogs (environmental chemical or parasite?)
WorldWatcher: Scientific
visualizations for global inquiry
Students at all grade levels and in every domain
of science should have the opportunity to use
scientific inquiry and develop the ability to think
and act in ways associated with inquiry…
(National Science Education Standards,
National Research Council, 1996, p. 105)
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Using visual reasoning for pattern perception
in inquiries involving complex data sets
CoVis and later WorldWatcher global warming
curriculum as examples
Who: Daniel Edelson (Northwestern U), Roy
Pea, Douglas Gordin (now at SRI International)
The multi-agency GLOBE Project coordinated
by NSF provides another example
A visualization of temperature data for the Northern
Hemisphere displayed by Transform, a powerful,
general-purpose visualization environment widely used
by scientific researchers
A visualization window from the WorldWatcher software
displaying surface temperature for January 1987.
The interface to the library of energy balance data in
the WorldWatcher global warming curriculum
A tenth grade student’s hand-drawn visualization of
global temperature for July (Edelson, Gordin, & Pea, J.
Learning Sciences, 1999.
Questions about visualization
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For what domains are visualizations particularly
crucial for promoting understanding?
How does the use of these visualizations
influence mental imagery and reasoning in
problem solving both while using and when
without access to the computer-generated
visualizations?
How do how these representations ease the
tasks of understanding and using knowledge
about the conceptual systems they depict?
We need an empirical science of representational
design for understanding complexity, not only
capturing and displaying it.
Intelligent tutoring environments
Target:
Age:
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Who:
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Learning
sciences
questions
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Better and more efficient learning of well-structured domains:
algebra I, geometry, algebra II, college algebra
Middle school to remedial college
Pittsburgh Advanced Cognitive Tutor Center (Koedinger,
Anderson, Corbett); new NSF research center (CIRCLE)
Cognitive Tutors conjoin a research base from cognitive
psychology (ACT-R) and artificial intelligence with curriculum
content in mathematics from math educators
Key tenets of theory:
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Learning by doing, not listening or watching
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Production rules represent performance knowledge

Units are modular, so isolate skills, concepts, strategies

Units are context-specific, so address when as well as how
In search of “2-sigma effect” where human tutors excel over
classroom instruction by two standard deviations (Bloom, 1984)
What cognitive tutors do
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Provide a cognitive model that incorporates different strategies and
typical student misconceptions
Provide model tracing that follows a student through their individual
approach to a problem (context-sensitivity)
Uses knowledge tracing to assess student knowledge growth
through graded levels of competence, and adaptively select
activities for learning (“just-in-time” assistance in reasoning)
PUMP algebra tutor provides 1 standard deviation improvement:
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Results after 3 years of replicated studies of urban school use in
Pittsburgh and Milwaukee indicate increases of 15-25% on
standardized tests (SAT subtest, Iowa) and 50%-100% better on
problem solving and representation use measures.
Students highly motivated, reduce embarrassment, and succeed
Teachers are able to shift their attention and support to struggling
students
The view from research to practice
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Too much like Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorker
poster of Manhattan…...“Everyone knows about the
advances in the learning sciences”
Really?
These advances are too rarely reflected in
educational practices.
New volume on Learning Research and Educational
Practice (Bransford and Pellegrino, Co-Chairs)
Linear flow model
The usual means of knowledge transfer through “dissemination” has rarely worked for
bringing research to bear broadly on practice*
* Source: 1999 NAS report on “Bridging Learning Research and Educational Practices”
Reciprocity-of-influence model
* Source: 1999 NAS report on “Bridging Learning Research and Educational Practices”
Defining the challenges of
scaleup and sustainability

Most studies with designs of interactive learning
environments informed by the sciences of learning are:

Small-scale efforts

Not sustained

Common problem of “lethal mutation” of innovations

Cultural and linguistic diversity of school environments
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Importance of attention to standards, accountability,
assessment at a local level
Teacher professional development
Marketplace issues: from prototypes to sustainable
products and services with needed support
Scaling of innovations
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The successes of learning technology innovations are
typically accompanied by “researcher hothouse effects”
Common problem of “lethal mutation” of innovations (Ann
Brown)
Why? Teachers are designers!
Teachers continue to design curricula in their classroom
uses and local adaptations (four phases of curricula)
Need to localize for success rarely supported by teachers’
understanding of the design rationale for why the
innovation has its features and practices
Cultural and linguistic diversity of school environments
Standards, accountability, assessment
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Curriculum practices are strongly
driven by systems of accountability
and assessment
Standards provide an important
common language for expected
outcomes
Educators need usable and
compelling forms of assessment in
tandem with innovative curricula and
technologies for learning
Performance and portfolio
assessments are making headway as
more meaningful guides to progress
Teacher professional development
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Teacher Professional Development (TPD) is a critical
component of all education reform efforts
Formal TPD approaches (e.g., summer institutes,
collaboratives) can offer motivating, collaborative learning
experiences but find it hard to:
 scale to large numbers
 sustain collaboration back at teachers’ home sites
 provide cost- and time-effective support through the
change process
 tailor content to local school, district initiatives
 build infrastructure for sustainable TPD (and reform)
systems
Difficulties confirmed in evaluation of NSF’s SSI TPD work
Evaluation of NSF’s SSI TPD efforts*

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Most states provided limited TPD time and the SSIs typically
supplemented formal TPD activities with less than 1 week a year
No SSI had resources to reach all teachers needing TPD—only a minority
Follow-up procedures require many opportunities for assistance,
feedback, and reflection in coaching, meeting with others involved in the
process or other connections with colleagues
Intros of new practices require time for discussion, questioning, risk-free
practice, sharing and reflection, revision
Interaction with colleagues very important, since teachers often work in
isolation and lack opportunities to observe others, share their expertise
and experience, or practice new techniques.
Good TPD helps build learning communities within, among, and beyond
schools
(Source: Corcoran, Shields and Zucker, SRI International, March 1998)
The research-commerce culture divide

Marketplace issues: from prototypes to products and services
with necessary support

Two cultures: different audiences, purposes, pressures

The divide may narrow as….

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Research greets complexities of practice

Grant agencies seek scale and sustainability

Companies seek innovations and to leverage external
research
New models for public-private partnerships will need to evolve
(beyond “technology transfer”)
Tackling the challenges of
scaleup and sustainability



A design research orientation
With partnership models that can work in
bringing together necessary expertise and
realism to scaleable learning improvements
With networked improvement communities that
seek to augment collective intelligence for some
purpose and develop sustainable solutions
A Design Research Focus

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Design research

Challenges the traditional basic-applied science
distinction

Embraces situational complexity and works to
manage it through to solutions, and reflect them as
cases
“Learning engineering”: Iterative design over
multiple generations of a research-guided
intervention to improve learning
The need for partnership models

Tackling design research toward scaleable models

Brief examples:

SCOPE: Science Controversies On-Line:
Partnerships in Education (UC Berkeley and
SCIENCE magazine)

LeTUS “design circles” of middle school science
teachers, curriculum and assessment experts,
learning researchers, technology developers
(Northwestern and Chicago Schools; U. Michigan
and Detroit Schools)
Networked improvement communities

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Communities that seek to augment collective
intelligence for some purpose using the net:

ESCOT integration teams

TAPPED IN and ongoing teacher professional
development

CILT and industry alliance program
Infrastructure is coming together for schools, homes


ESCOT is a digital library of linkable component tools and a
community of teachers, researchers & developers creating,
improving, and testing these technologies in real classrooms
with real curricula
Principal Investigators: Jeremy Roschelle, Roy Pea, Chris
Digiano, Jim Kaput
The ESCOT Testbed
Curriculum Database
Software Innovation
organizing information that link s
concepts, activities & technologies
designing pedagogically-sound
re-usable, linkable components
Integration Teams
composing or structuring lessons
that tie components to curriculum
Towards a digital library of re-usable components
for middle-school mathematics
‘Best of class’ graphs, tables,
calculators, dynamic geometry,
simulations, … 100 or so core
elements

Enable plug and play, mix and match

Linked multiple representations and
other core educational features

•
Key ESCOT Partners:
•
SRI International
•
Key Curriculum Press (Geometer’s Sketchpad)
•
The Show Me Center, University of Missouri
•
Swarthmore (MathForum),
•
University of Colorado, Boulder (AgentSheets)
•
University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth (SimCalc)
ESCOT Integration Teams put
components together

Teacher: Pedagogical Design

Developer: Component Design

Web facilitator: Web Design (& teamwork)
It’s the right time

Java: a common platform

XML: integration glue

Web: coordinate distributed work

Standards (e.g IMS)

Labelling for search (metadata)

Plug & play, mix match

Linked representations

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Web-based teacher professional development (TPD) environment designed with easyto-understand ‘virtual conference center’ metaphor (‘social computing’ research)

Multi-user, chat, and shared Web browsing

Supports use of assessment and curriculum development tools
Significant growth and demand

Over 3,400 registered users, 14 partnership organizations (as unmarketed R&D)

Technical plans for enabling large-scale implementations
Strong brand identity and evangelists

NY Times “How to get the most from computers in the classroom”

Highlighted in US Dept of Education’s ”What works”

Working with LA Unified and state of Kentucky in major reform plans
Funding by National Science Foundation private foundations, “tenants,” and
corporate sponsorship (Sun Microsystems)
Room description goes here...
Introducing CILT

Roy Pea (SRI), Marcia Linn (UC Berkeley),
John Bransford (Vanderbilt), Barbara Means
(SRI), Bob Tinker (Concord Consortium)
Concord
Consortium
Center for Innovative
Learning Technologies

A distributed center for advancing LT R&D

MISSION:
C
I
L
T



To serve as a national resource for stimulating research
on innovative, technology-enabled solutions to critical
problems in K-14 learning in science, mathematics,
engineering and technology.
Open structure with annual workshops for harvesting
knowledge and leveraging diverse efforts
Working on “theme teams” of high-priority led by 2-3
senior researchers and a post-doctoral scholar

Visualization and Modeling

Ubiquitous Computing

Community Tools

Assessments for Learning
CILT’s Industry Alliance Program




How we are working on the research-commerce
divide through industry alliances
Intel’s senior partnership with CILT community
Texas Instruments and hand-held learning
environments
Palm Computer sponsorship of CILT educational
software design competition
Some closing observations...
Underlying dynamics of forces
in the technological landscape

Moore’s Law
Microprocessing capability
doubles every year or at least
every 18 months

Metcalfe’s Law
The value of a network is the
square of the number of nodes
connected to that network
Supply chain
efficiencies and virtual
companies are
revamping global
business and will affect
every life sector
(PITAC 98 Report)
Fast PCs and
information appliances,
“fat pipes,” digital
content
President’s Information Technology
Advisory Committee Report to the
President (August 98)
Vision of Transforming the Way We Learn
“Any individual can participate in on-line education
programs regardless of geographic location, age,
physical limitation, or personal schedule. Everyone
can access repositories of educational materials,
easily recalling past lessons, updating skills, or
selecting from among different teaching methods in
order to discover the most effective style for that
individual. Educational programs can be customized
to each individual’s needs, so that our information
revolution reaches everyone and no one gets left
behind.”
It’s not enough of a “Grand Challenge”




Enabling this vision requires re-inventing learning
substantively, not only the HOW and WHEN of learning
We will do better at re-inventing learning if we heed the
PITAC visions of transforming the ways we:

Communicate

Deal with information (I/O)

Work

Design and build things

Conduct research

Deal with the environment

Do commerce
Each of these areas in society is spawning new literacies
and required skills for an informed and proficient citizen.
Keeping education apace of the needed learning curve is
the Grand Challenge
Looking forward,
computational media will...




Because of their use in research and society, continue to
create new content, in mathematics and science such as
complexity theory, neural nets, emergence
Allow broad accessibility of powerful ideas, and alter the
age level and sequencing of curriculum we will need to
invent to meet the demands of a new knowledge age
Thus require ‘partnership model’ research and development at
the edges of content-coming-to-be — collaborative
innovations and empirical investigations of co-evolving subject
matter, technology and appropriate curriculum
Such research by definition will be at the interstices of the
disciplinary areas by which the National Science Foundation
is organized
Let’s work together to rise to this
Grand Challenge for learning and
its affiliated sciences…….
THANKS
FOR YOUR TIME
Please visit us at
CILT.org
and
SRI.com/Policy/CTL!!
Large research challenges




Infomating the physical environment for learning with
ubiquitous computing and transmitting (Spohrer’s
WorldBoard concept extending web URLs to geo-located
things-in-the-world)
Developing Bayesian and other machine learning
approaches to user-profiling of sufficient power that they
may infer a learner’s interests and abilities from their netbased interactons, and offer up relevant resources to
learn
Pervasive knowledge integration environments with rich
and age-appropriate metadata cataloging of web
resources for inquiries to develop high-standards learning
Lifelong digital portfolios of learning
“We predict that ‘educational portals’ providing a gateway to
the Internet, the world’s greatest library, will emerge in K-12,
postsecondary and corporate training markets.”
The Book of Knowledge: Investing in the growing education and training industry.
M. Moe, K. Bailey, & R. Lau. Merrill-Lynch In-Depth Report, April 9, 1999.
Facing the challenge
Research in context of
learning portals is needed



To grow connected learning communities based on...

Quality (from research and experience)

Cooperation (we share information to help one another
learn)

Collaboration (learning together)

Communication
To accelerate distributed learning….

Effective use of better standards-based learning resources
and assessments

Teacher professional development

Effective student use of the Internet for learning

School-home connections
To bring customers-providers together more effectively
Emerging Learning “Solutions”
Concept: Service provision via web-based network from
any device*
ZeroAdmin
Servers
ASPs
CSPs
ISPs
WAN Connectivity
Schools
K-12 Portals as
leverage point
for investment
LAN
Homes
PCs
Macs
Thin
clients
HHC
Webphones
* As in:


Sun Microsystem’s “WebTone”
Microsoft’s “Digital Nervous System”