Report on the CILT-2000 conference in Washington DC:
Technology, Equity, and K-14 Learning
“Bridging the digital divide”
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Reporters
Carolyn Gale (cgale@stanford.edu)
SLL (Stanford Learning Lab)
Ambjorn Naeve (amb@nada.kth.se)
Centre for user-oriented IT Design
Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)
Stockholm, Sweden
website: www.cilt.org/cilt2000
About the Conference
• CILT's annual conference is a collaborative
forum for leaders in learning technology
research, K-14 education, industry, and policy.
• 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.
Organizing Committee
Stanford
Research
Institute
University
California
Berkely
Vanderbilt
University
Concord
Consortium
Marcia Linn John Bransford Bob Tinker
Roy Pea
Barbara Means
Theme
Teams
Visualization
& Modeling
Synergy
Assessment
for Learning
(postdocs)
Ubiquitous
Computing
Community
Tools
Marcia Linn John Bransford Bob Tinker
Roy Pea
Nancy Songer
Jeremy Roschelle
October 27 and 28, 2000
CILT Schedule
• 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.
• 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.
Interactive panel
Rethinking the "Digital Divide"
• Many recent studies
document growing inequities
in access to technical resources
and the opportunities they represent.
• 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).
Keynote (cont.)
Roberta Katz
• 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 …..
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.
• SimCalc: Democratizing access
to the mathematics of change.
• Science inquiry
in explorable virtual environments.
• CyberMath: A Shared Virtual 3D-environment
for Mathematics Exploration.
• 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.
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.
• 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:
Technology & Team
• Technology
Interactive tools for visualizing, transforming
and simulating mathematical objects
will enable every student
to achieve deep conceptual understanding.
• Team
SimCalc 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.
SimCalc:
Interactive Graphs-1
SimCalc:
Interactive Graphs-2
Science inquiry in explorable
virtual environments
Chris Dede
Harward University
website: http://www.virtual.gmu.edu
Science inquiry in explorable VR environments:
Addessed issues
• How to use modeling & visualization (MV)
with a generation already adept at interacting
with compelling, but mindless
multisensory forms of entertainment?
• 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 collaboration
for Educational Researchers
Partnering with:
• 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.
Science inquiry in explorable VR environments:
Potential advantages
Multisensory immersion:
• skill development in authentic settings.
• cognitive complexity into sensory processing.
• bridging visual learners into abstract thinking,
formal notation, and causality.
Distributed simulation:
• fantasy, challenge, curiosity, beauty, fun.
• collaborative construction and social interaction.
• reconceptualizing personal “authenticity”.
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.
Science inquiry in explorable VR environments:
Case Study
Project ScienceSpace:
Using Immersive Virtual Worlds
in Real World Classrooms
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.
Ambjorn Naeve & Gustav Taxén
Royal Inst. of Technology
Stockholm / Sweden
website: cid.nada.kth.se/il
CyberMath
Goals: The CyberMath system should allow:
• teaching of both elementary, intermediate
and advanced mathematics and geometry.
• the teacher to teach in a direct manner.
• teachers to present material that is hard
to visualize using standard teaching tools.
• students to work together in groups.
• global sharing of resources.
Means:
• Making use of advanced VR technology.
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.
Presentations (cont.)
Community Tools
• 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.
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
Ambjorn Naeve
Royal Inst. of Technology
Stockholm / Sweden
website: cid.nada.kth.se/il
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.
• label the components with a standardized
data description (metadata) scheme (IMS-IEEE).
• filter the components through different aspects.
• transform a content component which is a map
into a context by contextualizing it.
Conzilla:
Conceptual browsing:
Surfing the context
Context
Content
Mathematics
Surf
View
Info
Geometry
Algebra
Analysis
Combinatorics
Conzilla:
Conceptual Browsing:
Viewing the content
Context
Content
Geometry
Algebraic
Differential
Projective
What
How
Surf
Where
View
When
Info
Who
Projective geo metry
is the stu dy
of th e inciden ces
of p oints , lines
an d planes
in space.
It could be called
the geometry
of th e e ye
Conzilla:
Conceptual Browsing:
2D-filtering of the content
Context
Aspect Filter
Elementary
Geometry
Secondary
Algebraic
High
Differential
Surf
Projective
View
Info
School
Level
Aspect
W
h
a
t
H
o
w
W
h
e
r
e
...
Conzilla:
Where is mathematics done?
Depth
Clarification
Context
Content
Mathematics
Mathematics
Surf
View
Info
What
inspire
Magic
Religion
How
Where
When
Who
Philosophy
Science
Conzilla:
How is mathematics applied to science?
Depth
Contextualize
Clarification
Context
Mathematics
inspire
Content
Magic
Religion
Science
inspire
Mathematics
Magic
assumption *
* logical conclusion
A is true  B is true
Religion
fact


What
How
Where
When
Who
Philosophy

Surf
View
Info
Science
Philosophy
If A were true
then
B would be true
* conditional

Science
statement
Mathematics
*
experiment
Falsification of assumptions
by falsification of their logical conclusions
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.
Presentations (cont.)
Assessment
• 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
Ubiquitous Computing
• 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
Synergy/Professional development
• Interactive Video Network, A Missed opportunity.
• Grabbing Hold:
Teachers as their own Internet Service Provider.
• Report from the Workshop to Integrate Computerbased 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 (cont.)
Synergy/Professional development
• State Policies Matter: In-service Teacher
Professional Development in Technology.
• Online Learning: The LearnFromUs Project.
• Visualization and Model-based Reasoning
Using Groundwater Computer Models:
Science Teacher Protocols.
• Teaming as a Means to Sustainability.