Research

The latest findings from experts in the field related to the future of learning.

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If Robots Will Run the World, What Should Students Learn?

April 12, 2013 | 10:39 AM | By
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Education reformers have been calling for a different type of education, one that nurtures creative and innovative thinkers. But for many, that future is hard to see and even harder to influence.

Science fiction writers and blockbuster movies have been predicting a world run by robots for decades, and for most of us, the fantasy has stayed in the realm of fiction. But artificial intelligence has made rapid progress and robots are becoming more a part of everyday life than many people realize. Those who study robots and their impact on life foresee a day not too far off when many jobs now held by people will be automated.

“If you can detect a pattern, you can automate it,” said Charles Fadel, founder of the Center for Curriculum Redesign and a visiting practitioner at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, who spoke at the recent Learning and the Brain Conference. Fadel sees signs that robots are already becoming a part of everyday life. Google has a self-driving car. Japan recently put on a concert, attended by thousands of people, featuring a hologram popstar with a synthesized voice. Virtual models are gradually being put to work displaying the newest styles, and Watson the supercomputer whooped-on the best Jeopardy players. Signs of robotic intelligence are everywhere and educators need to be preparing students to enter a dramatically different world, Fadel said.

“The role of the educator is to channel and guide what is fundamentally an improvisational process.”

As artificial intelligence improves and slowly takes over aspects of daily life, the only way for people to continue to be useful is to “up-skill” — and that takes creativity. “Incremental creativity is just improving on something, but radical creativity is thinking something up,” Fadel said. He believes that, in time, computers will be capable of incremental creativity, slowly improving a process and building on its success. What they will never be able to do is generate a radically new idea.

“We’re being pushed upwards in abstraction, in some senses,” Fadel said. Recognizing how sophisticated computers already are, and how much better the algorithms are getting will be important as the education system evolves. Implicit in Fadel’s stark view of how artificial Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Research, artificial intelligence, collaborative learning, creativity, project-based-learning

Finding Solutions for Tech Troubles In Schools

April 11, 2013 | 8:00 AM | By

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With the onset of the Common Core State Standards, which teachers are expected to implement next year, and the growth of blended learning, the role of digital resources both for instruction and assessment has come under close scrutiny. The quickly shifting landscape is leaving many Internet Technology directors worrying that they won’t be able to meet the demand for fast and reliable Internet service.

The Consortium for School Networking‘s (CoSN) recently surveyed IT leaders and found their top three priorities are Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies, assessment readiness, and broadband access. All of these priorities hinge upon one thing – lots of bandwidth.

Recognizing the substantial challenge facing many school districts, CoSN has launched the Designing Education Network (DEN) initiative to compile best practices for how to quickly and carefully build up IT infrastructure.

“If you’re first grader and you are learning to read and you’ve got a screen that takes 90 seconds to load, you may not be able to sit still that long.”

“One of the reasons we want to identify best practices and vendor neutral resources is because districts don’t have resources to hire consultants for research and development,” said Denise Atkinson-Shorey, project director for DEN. In fact, 80 percent of school districts predict they will have flat or declining IT budgets for the next school year. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Research, Teaching With Tech, broadband, Common Core State Standards, CoSN

Combining Robotics With Poetry? Art and Engineering Can Co-Exist

April 4, 2013 | 8:00 AM | By
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Sue Mellon

By Barbara Ray

At the beginning, people thought she was nuts. Sue Mellon, gifted support coordinator for Springdale Junior and Senior High/Colfax School in the Allegheny Valley School District, thought 7th and 8thgraders could develop a deeper understanding of poetry by playing around with robotics.

“Originally, people looked at me like I was crazy,” Mellon said. Now, two years later, Robotics Poetry is a staple of language arts classes at Springdale and a new grant has students preparing to be peer mentors.

Poetry isn’t always easy for students. But with hands-on engagement, they gain new understanding. Take Robert Frost’s “Pasture.” Instead of just reading and discussing the work in a typical classroom setting, students made 21st-century dioramas with robotic tool kits containing sensors, motors, LEDs, and a controller. One student made a blue plastic wrap lake in an old cardboard photocopy-paper box that vibrated, thanks to the motor, and, lit up, thanks to the LED. When the student said the word “water”—students record themselves reading the poems aloud in the audio-editing program Audacity—the LED turned the plastic wrap a deeper shade of blue. When he got to the bit about the “tottering” calf, the motor made the toy calf vibrate.

“Science, technology, engineering, math, art—that’s all really important. But really, integration is what’s the issue. That’s the critical piece.”

“A lot of kids aren’t crazy about poetry,” Mellon said. “But we have to help them engage with it. After spending two weeks analyzing the poem and creating visual imagery and symbolism for their dioramas, they really understand the work and get quite passionate.” Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Learning Methods, Research, collaborative learning, design thinking, STEM education

Connected Learning: Tying Student Passions to School Subjects

April 3, 2013 | 8:00 AM | By
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Quest to Learn

By Ashley Williams, Youth Radio

What if your extracurricular activities weren’t just extra but a part of your academics too? New thinking on education intends to bring students’ interests into the classroom. It’s called Connected Learning and promotes the idea that students will excel in school if what they are learning is relevant to their lives, experiences, and passions. This plan is spelled out in a new report, by Mimi Ito, the research director of the Digital Media and Learning Hub at the University of California Irvine.

While students would still learn core subjects like math and science, Connected Learning provides ways for students to link their classroom lessons to their lives outside the school. Ito says the objective of Connected Learning is to, “meet young people where they are in terms of their peer culture, their interest in popular culture, social media, rather than say you have to meet us where we are as adults.”

“It’s important to diversify the kinds of entry points for the kinds of pathways that young people have.”

Ito uses the Harry Potter Alliance to demonstrate how Connected Learning’s can be effective. She says, “the HPA connects young people who are inspired by the civic virtues portrayed in the Harry Potter books, and want to apply them to the real world.” This fan network organizes over social media platforms (Facebook, Livestream, Youtube, Twitter) to spread awareness and solutions to issues like, equality, and human rights, and to support of charitable causes. Literacy has been a central focus of the group. Their annual book drive has brought 85,000 donations since 2009 and contributions have helped build a library for a charter school in NYC.

Ito says another prime example of Connected Learning is at Youth Radio. The youth-driven media organization channels young peoples’ passions into education and job training. For instance, the poetry group inside Youth Radio, Remix Your Life, helps strengthen students’ writing skills, public speaking  and presentation skills while providing an outlet for us to express what we’re passionate about.

“Meet young people where they are in terms of their peer culture, their interest in popular culture, social media, rather than say you have to meet us where we are as adults.”

Here’s where Connected Learning could help close the opportunity gap. Ito says, “it’s important to diversify the kinds of entry points for the kinds of pathways that young people have.” She adds that “having their interests, their identities validated in the context of academic achievement, civic engagement” is essential to keeping students engaged. This could lead to better student Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Research, connected learning, design thinking, DML, Mimi Ito, project-based-learning, Quest to Learn

5 Tools to Help Students Learn How to Learn

March 20, 2013 | 8:00 AM | By
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Jamie Nast/Flickr

Helping students learn how to learn: That’s what most educators strive for, and that’s the goal of inquiry learning. That skill transfers to other academic subject areas and even to the workplace where employers have consistently said that they want creative, innovative and adaptive thinkers. Inquiry learning is an integrated approach that includes kinds of learning: content, literacy, information literacy, learning how to learn, and social or collaborative skills. Students think about the choices they make throughout the process and the way they feel as they learn. Those observations are as important as the content they learn or the projects they create.

“We want students thinking about their thinking,” said Leslie Maniotes a teacher effectiveness coach in the Denver Public Schools and one of the authors of Guided Inquiry: Learning in the 21st Century. “We want them reflecting on the process and the content.” Inquiry learning works best on longer, deep dive projects when students have to create something of their own out of what they’ve found.

“When they are able to see where they came from and where they got to it is very powerful for them.”

A good example is a long term research project. There are several common stages in longer projects and researchers have studied how students feel, think and act around the different stages. Students initiate the project, select a topic, explore it further, begin to formulate an approach, collect specific materials relevant to a focus and finally present on their findings.

During the process, students will go through different stages of emotions. They might feel Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Learning Methods, Research, collaborative learning, inquiry learning

Study: Path Through College is Indirect and Stressful for Many Students

March 18, 2013 | 10:12 AM | By
MyEdu

MyEdu

Despite a deeply held belief that success in college is crucial for success in life, the traditional path students assume they’ll take is more an exception than the rule, according to a new report.

Though most students believe the college path — high school, college with chosen major, internship, job — will smoothly go from one phase to the next, the reality is quite different for many students. And as a result, stress and anxiety is causing them to make haphazard decisions about their education.

Switching majors, falling behind the academic schedule, and feeling disenfranchised by the conventional college system are becoming institutionalized student experiences, states the report [PDF] from MyEdu, an Austin, Texas-based company that offers online tools to help college students manage their academic lives and career opportunities.

The study, which takes into account the randomly selected responses of 1,047 students from MyEdu’s 300,000 profiles, shows that more than half of students have switched or considered switching their major during their academic career and that the overwhelming reason for this change was due to changing interests, and a lack of enjoyment in the first major selected. What’s more, 37% of respondents classified themselves as “nontraditional students.”

So how to fix it?

Though many believe access to online courses through one of the proliferating MOOCs, study author Jon Kolko suggested online learning represents the wrong application of the right technology. Instead, he says the same kinds of algorithms that contribute to a self-paced math course, for example, should instead be used to evaluate a student’s progress in traditional college courses. For example, he envisions MyEdu and its competitors (such as Koofers, Princeton Review, and HeyCampus) offering tools that can take a student’s performance and feedback from a general education course and suggest or rule out potential majors.

“I don’t think computers are that good for learning, but they’re really good for this administrative side of things,” said Kolko, MyEdu’s vice president of design, who is planning on using feedback Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Research, Teaching With Tech, Higher Education, MOOC