Jeremy Roschelle

Handhelds go to school: lessons learned

Working in conjunction with teachers, researchers have developed a series of projects exploring the potential for using wireless handheld devices to enhance K-12 classroom instruction.

A walk on the WILD side: how wireless handhelds may change CSCL

Designs for CSCL applications usually presume a desktop/laptop computer. Yet future classrooms are likely to be organized around Wireless Internet Learning Devices (WILD) that resemble graphing calculators or Palm handhelds, connected by short-range wireless networking. WILD learning will have physical affordances that are different from todays computer lab, and different from classrooms with 5 students per computer. These differing affordances may lead to learning activities that deviate significantly from todays images of K-12 CSCL activities. Drawing upon research across a range of recent handheld projects, we suggest application-level affordances around which WILD-based CSCL has begun to organize: (a) augmenting physical space, (b) leveraging topological space, (c) aggregating coherently across all students, (d) conducting the class, and (e) act becomes artifact. We speculate on how CSCL research may consequently evolve towards a focus on kinds of systemic coupling in an augmented activity space.

Trajectories from today's WWW to a powerful educational infrastructure

Two previous Research News and Comment articles in Educational Researcher have examined the potential impact of the World Wide Web (web) in education. Owston (1997) offers a optimistic view of potential benefits of the today’s web, utilizing a framework that emphasizes: (a) making learning more accessible; (b) promoting improved learning; and (c) containing costs. Fetterman (1998) reviews the tools currently available on the web (such as search, video conferencing, and file sharing) and suggests potential uses among educational researchers. Although these articles offer valuable advice about today’s web capabilities, both authors acknowledge that the web is changing rapidly. They do not provide a sense of where the web is going, and how its trajectory of development may more fully meet educational needs. Such prospective information about emerging web technologies is important for the educational research community, and it is our intention to briefly highlight key trajectories of web development for learning communities. We recently hosted a workshop on “Tools for Learning Communities” under the auspices of the NSF-funded Center for Innovative Learning Technologies (CILT, which is pronounced like “silt”), bringing together 125 leading researchers and developers from a balanced mix of 50 institutions, including universities, nonprofit organizations, corporations and schools. For example, corporate participants included IBM Global Education, Apple Computer, Netscape, Coopers-Lybrand, NetSchools, and Electric Schoolhouse, LLC as well as many smaller firms. Academic and non-profit participants included researchers from the four CILT partner institutions, SRI International, UC Berkeley, Vanderbilt University, and Concord Consortium, as well as organizations, universities and high schools from all over North America. The innovative format of this workshop encouraged rapid information exchange, followed by brainstorming about educational issues and opportunities, and concluded with the formation of cross-institutional teams to seek joint innovation. Over the course of two days, the participants generated a wealth of ideas about the limitations of today’s web, its near-term trajectories, and

DESIGNING FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT SOFTWARE WITH TEACHERS: AN ANALYSIS OF THE CO-DESIGN PROCESS

Researchers in the learning sciences have explored a collaborative approach to developing innovations that fit into real classroom contexts. The co-design process relies on teachers’ ongoing involvement with the design of educational innovations, which typically employ technology as a critical support for practice. To date, investigators have described the application and results of co-design, but they have not defined the process nor explored how it plays out over time. In this paper, we define co-design as a highly-facilitated, teambased process in which teachers, researchers, and developers work together in defined roles to design an educational innovation, realize the design in one or more prototypes, and evaluate each prototype’s significance for addressing a concrete educational need. We suggest seven key process components and use data from a systematic set of interviews to illustrate the roles of teachers and researchers in co-design and describe how tensions in the process can unfold and be resolved over time.

Integration of Technology, Curriculum, and Professional Development for Advancing Middle School Mathematics Three Large-Scale Studies

The authors present three studies (two randomized controlled experiments and one embedded quasi-experiment) designed to evaluate the impact of replacement units targeting student learning of advanced middle school mathematics. The studies evaluated the SimCalc approach, which integrates an interactive representational technology, paper curriculum, and teacher professional development. Each study addressed both replicability of findings and robustness across Texas settings, with varied teacher characteristics (backgrounds, knowledge, attitudes) and student characteristics (demographics, levels of prior mathematics knowledge). Analyses revealed statistically significant main effects, with student-level effect sizes of .63, .50, and .56. These consistent gains support the conclusion that SimCalc is effective in enabling a wide variety of teachers in a diversity of settings to extend student learning to more advanced mathematics.

Ink, Improvisation, and Interactive Engagement: Learning with Tablets

Instructional models that reflective educators develop and share with their peers can primarily drive advances in the use of tablets in education. Communities that form around platforms such as Classroom Presenter and Group Scribbles should provide an excellent forum for such advances.

Log on education: science in the palms of their hands

In the beginning, there are children and the learning experiences we want them to have. Now, let’s bring in technology as the means for enabling those learning experiences. If we’re serious about having children use technology in K–12 classrooms, then we need to convince the gatekeepers of those classrooms as to the worth of the technology. Doing so requires that we speak in the language of the teachers’ profession: first identify the learning experiences and their outcomes, along with why those are desired, and then speak about how to enable those activities via technology. It’s a feature, not a bug, that teachers require this sort of argumentation. Teachers are protecting our children from gratuitous, trendy and ultimately empty, experiences. Here’s what the National Research Council says: “Inquiry into authentic questions generated from student experiences is the central strategy for teaching science.” By “authentic questions” the NRC does not mean questions at the end of a textbook chapter, but rather questions generated by students. The concern, the interest, and the motivation must come from the children; it is their questions. Now, teachers can surely help a child generate a question; an untutored 11-year-old’s question is something like “How

Guest Editorial: Special Section on Mobile and Ubiquitous Technologies for Learning

MOBILE learning is the study of how to harness personal and portable technologies for effective education. The term also covers research into technology-enabled learning across contexts and learning in an increasingly mobile society. The first phase of mobile learning, originating more than 60 years ago, was to equip classrooms and lecture theatres with handheld response systems to aggregate individual responses from students and to provoke discussion based on differences in answers to open response questions. The more recent technologies of graphing calculators and wireless handheld devices offer new learning opportunities for rapid sharing of data and knowledge, simulation and visualization, and computer-managed groupwork [3]. The second phase was strongly influenced by two major projects funded by the European Commission, MOBIlearn and m-Learning [1], with related efforts occurring across the globe. These projects explored the opportunities for learning with mobile technologies in nonformal settings, including homes, museums, workplaces, and outdoors. The emphasis of these projects was on the mobility of the learner and support for learning across contexts and life transitions. Studies by Livingstone [2] and colleagues have shown that adults, on average, engage in 13-17 hours per week of active learning and this is maintained throughout their lifetimes. Yet, less than 5 percent of this learning is within a school or formal education setting. So, we have a significant opportunity for personal technology to support the other 95 percent of lifelong learning. During the course of this second phase and continuing into the present, a huge wave of mobile technology adoption has swept throughout the world. Now, almost every adult and adolescent child in industrially developed countries owns a multimedia communicator with more computing power than guided the first landings on the moon. For many people in developing countries, the personal mobile phone is their only means of distance communication, automated calculation, precise timekeeping, and, increasingly, image and sound recording. In a seminal 1991 paper, Weiser argued “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it” [4]. In an emerging third phase of mobile learning, learning becomes embedded into everyday life. Children own tools for learning that they can carry with them from home, to school, to college, and into the workplace, constructing a personal and shared history of knowledge enrichment. Buildings, parks, and cities can be augmented to explain their history, ecology, or structure, enriching a tourist visit or field trip. Such pervasive learning technologies pose substantial practical and ethical problems. How can schools manage the disruption of children bringing their powerful personal technologies into the classroom? How far should formal education and training extend into the daily lives of children and employees? What rights do people have over learning-related materials they originate and share? A common theme of this special issue is the lowering of barriers between these three types of mobile learning: in the classroom, outside the classroom, and as part of everyday life. In “A Mobile Live Video Learning System for LargeScale Learning—System Design and Evaluation,“ Carsten Ullrich, Ruimen Shen, Ren Tong, and Xiaohong Tan describe a large-scale learning system that provides university students with access to live streamed lectures after work and on weekends, responding to the quadrupling of students in China enrolled in university education. Efficient compression provides high quality images of the lecture slides on students’ mobile phones, along with audio and video of the lecturer. The students can interact with the lecturer using SMS messaging and can respond to polls and activities initiated by the teacher. Two classes from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, with about 1,000 students in each, successfully used the system to study from lectures at home and on the move. At the other end of the spectrum of technology access, Divya Viswanathan and Jan Blom describe a design workshop in India with children aged 8-11 that proposed concepts for an engaging mobile learning device for children in their paper “New Metaphors from Old Practices—Mobile Learning to Revitalize Education in Developing Regions of the World.” They converge on the simple design metaphor of an electronic “slate” with the properties of touch interaction, small size, support for social use, and audio output. Two general requirements for effective learning are the ability to use the device across multiple contexts, for informal as well as formal learning, and to support both individual and group use. The Indian 4 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES, VOL. 3, NO. 1, JANUARY-MARCH 2010

Using components for rapid distributed software development

Software development has not reached the maturity of other engineering disciplines; it is still challenging to produce software that works reliably, is easy to use and maintain, and arrives within budget and on time. In addition, relatively small software systems for highly specific applications are in increasing demand. This need requires a significantly different approach to software development from that used by their large, monolithic, general-purpose software counterparts such as Microsoft Word. The paper discusses the use of components for rapid distributed software development. It reports on the the experience of a large testbed called Educational Software Components of Tomorrow (www.escot.org), supported by the US National Science Foundation.

Scaleable Integration of Educational Software: Exploring The Promise of Component Architectures

Technology-rich learning environments can accelerate and enhance core curriculum reform in science and mathematics by enabling more diverse students to learn more complex concepts with deeper understanding at a younger age. Unfortunately, todays technology research and development efforts result not in an richly integrated environment, but rather with a fragmentary collection of incompatible software application islands. In this article we ask: how can the best innovations in technology-rich learning integrate and scale up to the level of major curricular reforms? A potential solution is component software architecture, which provides open standards that enable plug and play composition of software tools produced by many different projects and vendors. We describe an exploratory effort in which four research groups produced software components for the mathematics of motion. The resulting prototypes support (a) integration of the separately produced tools into the same windows, files, and interfaces, (b) dynamic linking across multiple representations and (c) drag and drop activity authoring without programming. We also summarize an extended Internet discussion which raised critical issues regarding the future of component software architecture in education, and speculate on the future need for components for devices other than the desktop computer and for virtual communities that coordinate design teams. Reviewers: David Redmiles (U.California Irvine), Royston Sellman (Hewlett Packard Labs.)