Academic leaders are rethinking the purposes, costs, and consequences of college residence and student co-presence in the digital era. This forum investigates possibilities for reconfiguring the time, space, and experience of college brought about by the digital revolution.
Roy Pea will moderate a panel discussion on several LIFE Center related projects on this topic. Participants to include (invited): Carlin Llorente and Savitha Moorthy (SRI International), and Lori Takeuchi (Joan Ganz Cooney Center, Sesame Workshop).
Panelists
Carlin Llorente is a researcher and evaluator in SRI International’s Center for Technology in Learning. He studies media and technology supported learning, afterschool programs and other informal and casual learning environments, informal science learning, and non-traditional forms of assessment. His interests center on how current and emerging technologies may support new opportunities for learning (and teaching), especially for the economically and socially disadvantaged.
Educational innovations in youth learning today are bringing to the forefront issues of youth imagination, creation, collaboration, and innovation in a networked world of participatory culture and new media literacies. This forum will showcase design principles and research findings from ongoing partnership projects in Chicago and Oakland in under-resourced public schools and neighborhoods where students work with mentors in designs supporting their creation of video, radio, animations, spoken word poetry, and other media that advance 21st century competencies. Discussions will explore the promise of addressing digital divides and educational inequalities with such designs.
 Brigid Barron (SGSE) |
 Nichole Pinkard (DePaul University) |
 Elisabeth Soep (Oakland’s Youth Radio) |
LEAD Commission Symposium on Technology and Learning, convened at Stanford University, organized breakout sessions around three key questions: 1) How do we help schools and educators adopt technology, 2) How do we improve the market, and 3) How do we create the right infrastructure. Participants included leaders and decision-makers from government, business, and academic sectors, such as Jim Coulter (Co-Founder of TPG, Stanford University Board of Trustees; Jim Steyer, Founder of Common Sense Media and Stanford alumnus, as well as Margaret Spellings (former U.S. Secretary of Education), and Lee Bollinger (President of Columbia University). The Commissions’ goal is to develop a national blueprint detailing the opportunity for using technology as a catalyst to transform and improve American education, with input from multiple constituencies. It expects to release its findings and a blueprint for action in late 2012. For more information about the initiative and symposium, see: http://www.leadcommission.org.
Please join us for a lively discussion of emerging developments in PreK-12 digital learning in and across formal and informal environments. Co-hosted by Stanford University Graduate School of Education Professor Roy Pea with the U.S. Department of Education's Karen Cator, Director of the Office of Educational Technology and OET's Deputy Director, Richard Culatta, this meet up will be of interest to you as an ed-tech innovator or entrepreneur; learning sciences and technology researcher; or innovation-oriented educational leader. Please join and share your innovative work-in-progress, what you're up to and why, problems encountered, what you are learning and what kinds of expertise/partners you could use. (Not for making funding pitches or selling products). We hope you can join!
“Education Drives America” to Spotlight Education Successes, Engage Communities in Conversations about School Reform, College Affordability, and Link Between Education and Economy
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will kick off the U.S. Department of Education’s third annual back-to-school bus tour on Wednesday, Sept. 12 in Redwood City, Calif., with a visit to Sequoia High School. This school visit is the official first event in a series of engagements to be held coast-to-coast where Secretary Duncan and other senior leaders from the Department will highlight the theme that Education Drives America.
His Event 4 of the day is at Stanford University where he would join "Silicon Valley Digital Learning Meetup" and meet with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to discuss technology in education.
Schools are peculiarly capacious organizations, taking many forms and playing many roles in modern societies. Schools impart the skills necessary for people to work productively in modern economies – a function that (however crucial) has absorbed most public and academic attention to the exclusion of other purposes. The things learned in school also enable people to govern themselves informedly as democratic citizens; to respect and take care of their physical bodies and psychic lives; and to appreciate and benefit from human diversity. The knowledge codified in school curriculum both preserves and celebrates some of the best products of human culture. As organizations, schools are vital social hubs: coalescing people, talents, and ideas in ways that seed creativity and innovation.
The digital revolution in education is only one part of the larger digital transformation of modern life. Every contemporary institution—the family and intimacy, the workplace, the global financial system, politics, religion, and the organizational web of civil society—is being remade through digital media. So too is the character of the modern self. This class will explore how researchers and theorists are attempting to understand these transformations, and their ethical, political, and identity implications.
Since the 1960s, American education has anticipated the arrival of what Eric Ashby termed the Fourth Revolution — a dramatic change to higher education based on the transformative power of information technology. Despite its promise, the past half-century has seen very little in the way of sustained change, making the idea of an educational revolution continue to seem remote.
Recent developments in consumer media, mobile technology, and ubiquitous broadband continue to suggest dramatic change is imminent, but while most institutions envision digital futures as part of their five year plans, few institutions have plans for making next year significantly different from last year.
One promising vector for massive change can be seen in the rise of MOOCs and Flipped classrooms as platforms for "rockstar teachers" — teachers who embrace technology to dramatically increase the scale of their educational influence. From Salman Khan to Peter Norvig, there is a rising tide of educators who are reaching out beyond the boundaries of traditional classrooms, using technology to reach tens of thousands, even millions of students around the world.
The following are a list of upcoming Tanner Lectures. More information can also be found here.
The 'Cost Disease' in Higher Education: Is Technology the Answer?
William G. Bowen (President Emeritus, Princeton University and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation)
Lecture I: October 10
"The Productivity Problem in Higher Education"
5:30-7:00pm / Cemex Auditorium, Knight Management Center
Lecture II: October 11
"Prospects for an Online Learning 'Fix'"
5:30-7:00pm / Cemex Auditorium, Knight Management Center
Discussion I: October 11
Discussion II: October 12
10:00am-12:00pm / Lucas Conference Room 134A, SIEPR-Landau Economics Bldg.
Note: Due to limited seminar room capacity, priority seating will be given to Stanford affiliates
Commentators:
Andrew Delbanco (American Studies, Columbia)
Howard Gardner (Graduate School of Education, Harvard)
John Hennessy (President, Stanford)
Daphne Koller (Computer Science, Stanford)
Candace Thille is the Director of the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) at Carnegie Mellon University, a position she has held since the program’s inception in 2002. She is the co-director of OLnet. Jointly run by Carnegie Mellon and the Open University in the UK, OLnet is an international open educational research network. Candace’s focus of research and development is in applying results from the learning sciences to the design, implementation and evaluation of open web-based learning environments. Candace also currently serves as a redesign scholar for the National Center for Academic Transformation; as a Fellow of International Society for Design and Development in Education; and on the Global Executive Advisory board for Hewlett Packard’s Catalyst Initiative. She recently served on a working group at the U.S. Department of Education to write the National Education Technology Plan for the Obama Administration and is currently serving on a working group for U.S. Department of Education to evaluate of the effectiveness of online courses for secondary students.
Join the Ed-Tech Meetup's upcoming gathering on life skills and unconventional subjects. Speakers include Mike Fee of EverFi, Sam Chaudhary of ClassDojo, and Jodell Seagrave of Rocket21. For more information, look to the Ed-Tech Meetup website.
Whether you’re taking a computer science class, or a music class, let’s collaborate. We’ll first share what we’re learning, challenges, and discovery. Then we’ll divide into smaller groups to solve problems collaboratively.
Let’s order a drink or a coffee cake to support our venue. It’s fun to discuss and solve problems together!
Click here for more information or to register for the event.
Join the Open Everything Seminar Series, which runs November 6 until November 14. For event registration, go to the Open Knowledge website.
November 6, 2- 3:30 pm, LK102
Trends and Emerging Issues Relating to Open Access, Open Data
Lauren Schoenthaler Senior University Counsel, Stanford University
Lauren Schoenthaler, Senior University Counsel at Stanford University, will discuss issues related to a variety of “open” initiatives and their potential impact on Stanford faculty, staff and students; Stanford author rights in an era of openness; options for Stanford researchers when submitting articles to journals, and how to negotiate for open access to materials; how “open” should data be; data security and privacy.
November 8, 3-4:30 pm, LK102
Stanford Digital Repository
Mimi Calter Assistant University Librarian & Chief of Staff
This forum brings together four experts to explore key questions concerning the evolution of digital curricula. Participant speakers will include Catherine Casserly (CEO, Creative Commons); Tom Vander Ark (former Executive Director of Education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Managing Partner at Learn Capital and author of Getting Smart: How Digital Learning is Changing the World); Prasad Ram (Founder and CEO of Ednovo, a non-profit education company that develops Gooru, a search engine for learning) and Steve Midgley, Consulting Adviser to the US Department of Education and former Deputy Director of Education Technology, USDoE.
Join Michael Horn, executive director of education at the Innosight Institute, and Cheryl Vedoe, CEO of Apex Learning, for a conversation on the disruptive innovation of digital learning in schools nationwide. These education technology experts will discuss the opportunities digital learning presents districts to build effective, sustainable programs that can increase student achievement. Ask the experts and find the answers and best practices you need to drive academic success through digital learning.
Click here to register.
As learning environments become increasingly digital, longstanding questions of how to effectively assess learning outcomes in ways more closely resembling the performance of complex tasks in the world beyond school look large. Developments and future prospect are the focus of our panel discussion with local leaders on this topic, encompassing high school digital performance portfolio assessments, assessments of scientific inquiry competencies, and issues being raised for defining the future of NAEP—“the Nation’s Report Card.”
What Happened in Class
After leaving some time for reflection on the panel last week, Roy began class by pointing out how critical assessment is to everyone involved in education. Students care about passing their classes, parents care about their children's developing aptitudes, policymakers care about large-scale metrics of improvement and equity, and investors care about making maximum impact on meaningful metrics. Assessment is where we operationalize what we want out of education. What elements of our national, state, and local assessment enterprise are poised to change in education's digital future?
How might we synthesize and share a "Schoolhouse Rock" version of our discussions this quarter? Let's pick up where the "what happened in class" synopses leave off. From now until December 4, students will be synthesizing the most intriguing and thought-provoking Piazza posts and class content into a collection of six structured summaries that will each form a mini white-paper of sorts. The final document will be shared with the larger EDF community and made publicly available online.
Students will be assigned to small groups of six people, each based on one of the following six topics:
• "What is a university?" (Oct. 30th)
• "Living digitally" (Oct. 2nd)
• "The changing relationship between school and work / 21st century competencies" (Oct. 23rd)
• "Reflections on online higher education" (Oct. 9th and 16th)
• "Panel on digital technologies in K12" (Nov. 6th)
• "Panel on the future of assessment" (Nov. 13th)
For this class session, students will present in rapid form the essence of materials they have curated to capture our ongoing dialogue around education's digital future. The curated materials will be made available online, and we wanted to let you know about the opportunity to join the conversation on Tuesday to hear from the students directly.
During this final meeting of the fall convening of edf, we will also look ahead and provide an overview of our plans for winter quarter.
Final Meeting of EDF for Fall Quarter
CERAS Learning Hall
Tuesday, Dec. 4
5:15-7:05
During fall quarter we engaged a variety of themes — building a broad intellectual foundation on the pre-history and contemporary experience of education’s digital expressions. We had serious discussion around the nature and purposes of education; the complexity of the contemporary university; the character of work, life, and subjectivity in the digital age; and the current frontiers of curriculum development and educational assessment through digital media.
During Winter Quarter we will explore four broad themes: the dynamic boundary between high school and college, accreditation, digital curriculum innovations in STEM and humanities education, and gaming to learn.
During Spring Quarter we will take up questions related educational equity in the digital era, new media literacy and youth culture, and learning analytics and new forms of educational research.
The Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC) is working to make personalized learning a reality for every U.S. student by improving the integration of education technology – reducing educators’ time spent tracking the progress of students, and making it possible to support teachers in their craft by recommending individualized learning resources for their students.
The SLC is coming to the Bay Area January 12 - 13 for an all-hands SLC Camp and Codeathon. We need teachers and developers to work together in creating new applications for teaching and learning, and to identify quality online content for the classroom. Through a fun and stimulating weekend of collaboration we aim to provide participants with a chance to become part of a growing community of practitioners who are preparing for the national launch of SLC in early 2013. At the end of the event we will also be awarding two $2,000 prizes for best application prototypes.
The boundaries between high school and college were established during a very different epoch of industrial capitalism. Digital technology is finally making it possible to consider other ways of structuring education, connecting school and work, and integrating both into the life course of young adulthood. This section summarizes the origins of the formalization of high school and college as separate, internally coherent times and places, and considers the possible benefits and challenges of reorganizing the time/space of what we now call grades 10-14.
Credentialing and accreditation are crucial features of our current educational system. Both the high school diploma and the college degree are widely recognized standards by which graduates are sorted into jobs and other social positions, and by which we as a society have certified that certain skills and knowledge are reproduced over time. The current credentialing system developed as a series of independently negotiated compacts between particular schools sharing similar prestige and status: gentlemen’s agreements now being challenged by seismic changes to the political economy of US higher education. How should credentialing happen in education’s digital future?
Revolutions create opportunity for imaginative rethinking of long-established institutions. This is such a moment for academic credit and accreditation. Today’s class will provide opportunity for students, working in small groups, to imagine novel systems for certifying instruction, learning, and credit accumulation over the life course.
Digital technology enables transformations of teaching and learning, not simply making pre-existing forms and pedagogies digital. These transformations are enabling forms of inquiry, reasoning, and communication that more closely resemble mature practices in the disciplines. At the same time, they make new forms of educational measurement possible. These two class sessions (a first dedicated to expanding rights to know and learn in and out of school and a second encompassing new ways of teaching science, technology, engineering, and math [STEM]) will engage in questions related to the evolution of digital curricula and pedagogies and new ways of assessing learning.
Many new interactive tools for learning and teaching STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) have been developed in recent years. They include micro-worlds for learning computational thinking in STEM; mobile sensors and probeware for capturing and graphing data during scientific inquiry; scientific data visualization web environments; scientific inquiry support environments in biology, chemistry and physics; K-12 intelligent tutoring systems in mathematics; and educational robotics. Coupled with the new Common Core Standards in mathematics and forthcoming Next Generation Science Standards, many are optimistic about the prospects of deeper learning in STEM domains for all our diverse students.
 Malcolm Bauer |
 James Gee |
 Constance Steinkuehler |
 Dan Schwartz |
Working in small groups, we begin to curate and summarize the work accomplished this quarter.
Presentations of white papers for Winter Quarter 403x.
Roy Pea will provide a historical perspective of how issues of digital divide have been conceived, measured and addressed from a policy perspective over the past three decades – and explain why there will always be a digital divide, based on the business logic of technological innovation.
Mitchell Stevens provides an overview of the broad corpus of social-science research on the character of inequality in US schooling.
In this session we will work in breakout groups to characterize the range of issues involved in addressing issues of digital divide relating to educational inequalities, and consider design approaches and tradeoffs to addressing them in novel ways.
Major attention is being devoted to issues of digital divides and educational inequalities as nations and states design and implement strategies for K-12 technology-enhanced learning in an increasingly networked world. What approaches to tackling these issues are being attempted in the United States and around the globe, and what is being learned about what happens 'on the ground' when such strategies are implemented?
 Mark Warschauer (UC Irvine) |
 Wayne Grant (Intel) |
Roy Pea with students will provide a panel to explain what underlies the rapidly growing interest in “big data” in the education field with digitally enhanced learning and teaching. The fields of learning analytics (and closely associated educational data mining) are new developments in the world of digital education. With digital curriculum aligned to Common Core Standards in math and English language arts (and soon science), and formative assessments and recommendation engines for learning resources, far more extensive data are available to guide the provision of responsive educational resources and supports for students towards personalized learning.
Paulo Blikstein and students will provide a panel to introduce the emerging topic on how multimodal data captured during learning and teaching can enable assessment of complex learning performances such as project-based learning and collaborative learning, and enable better understandings of the contexts in which learning is occurring.
What was once called a “traditional” college model of four years of co-present instruction on residential campuses is no longer a tenable or even desirable goal for national public policy. In this session we will work in groups do discuss alternative models of college delivery.
