PARTICIPANTS
MONICA MARTINEZ, MODERATOR, is the vice president for education strategy
for the KnowledgeWorks Foundation. Prior to this, while she was at the Institute
for Educational Leadership in Washington, D.C., Martinez founded the
National High School Alliance, a partnership of more than 40 organizations sharing
a common commitment to promote excellence, equity, and development of
high school–aged youth.
KEVIN CLARK is an associate professor and program coordinator of the instructional
technology program in the College of Education and Human Development
at George Mason University. Prior to his work in academia, Clark was a designer
and senior program manager for Lightspan, Inc. (currently Plato Learning). His
research interests focus on the design and development of online learning environments,
the role of gaming and media in formal and informal learning, and the
use of technology in learning with underserved populations.
CARL E. HARRIS is the superintendent of Durham Public Schools in North Carolina.
He is the immediate past president of the North Carolina Association
of School Administrators and chairs the North Carolina State Council on
Accreditation and School Improvement (CASI), Southern Association of Colleges
and Schools. In 2002, Clark was named a Broad Center Fellow as one of
23 professionals from across the nation who completed the inaugural class of
the Urban Superintendents Academy, sponsored by the Broad Foundation in
Los Angeles, Calif.
CHARLES (CHUCK) HOUSE is executive director of Media X, Stanford University’s
membership-research program on media and technology. He also is a
senior research scholar, working in technology-enabled communications, collaboration,
and community. Previously, he was the director of societal impact
of technology for Intel Corporation. House was instrumental in establishing the
Center for Information Technologies and Society at the University of California,
Santa Barbara, and serves as advisory chair. He is a past president of the
Association for Computing Machinery and an IEEE Fellow.
HENRY KELLY is president of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS). Previously,
he was assistant director for technology in the White House’s Office of
Science and Technology, helping negotiate and implement major administration research
partnerships in energy and the environment, information technology,
and learning technology. He convened the President’s Information Technology
Advisory Committee and helped translate its advice into a large expansion and
refocusing of federal information-technology research.
MONICA MARTINEZ: KNOWLEDGEWorks
Foundation is about eight
years old and was created from the assets
of the student-lending corporation.
We have primarily served Ohio
over the last eight years, but are starting
to think about some national and
other statewide initiatives.
One of the reasons we are trying
to go national is because of the viral
effect our Map of Future Forces has had
on us. About a year and a half ago,
our chief executive officer contracted
the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit
think tank in Palo Alto, Calif.,
to create a Map of Future Forces Affecting
Education so we could begin
to have a new conversation with a new
paradigm about how education has
to change. Instead of fully focusing
on things that are current and specific
to the student–achievement gap
among people of color and low- and
high-income issues, we try to take
that conversation to the next level.
These are all real problems that could
be exacerbated or solved if we start
thinking about some of the forces that
exist in the external environment that
are going to press on education.
What we see in this map, the big
message to us, is: "Hey, students are
learning differently." This is about
participatory pedagogy. This is about
meeting a visible community for
learning, but possibly not at a school-
house. This is about how you use personal digital media. This
is about a media–rich environment where information is ubiquitous.
This is about gaining a personalized learning plan.
This is about an extended learning economy where anybody,
anyplace, anytime can actually offer education to multiple
people. Learning is happening beyond the schoolhouse–after
school, in study–abroad programs, and in other enrichment opportunities.
With this, there are many different providers of
learning, potentially increasing the role of businesses and communities.
Will our public
education system be able to
sustain itself within this?
To get started, tell us about
where you work and how you
see these forces taking shape.
CARL HARRIS: I do not classify
myself as a futuristic person,
but I do have a sense of
what education might look
like in the future. In our public
schools in Durham, N.C., we have approximately 32,000
students. We are an urban environment struggling with the challenges
of redesigning our school system so we can meet the needs
of today’s learner. I think education will look different in the
future because the access to information–and that information
itself–will be far different from the way it is within the
system that we currently use.
CHUCK HOUSE: I’m at Media X at Stanford University and am
reasonably familiar with the Institute for the Future. With respect
to the Map and its interactive nature, it seems to me to
be a most effective categorization of a lot of the trends and
thoughts that we’re seeing.
KEVIN CLARK: I am a professor at George Mason University
in instructional technology and have a background in designing
and developing educational games. I have two ways of coming
at this. One is the business of education. I’ve visited most
of this country’s urban centers and talked to them about technology
and how it could help improve their student scores and
teacher practice. On the other side, I do research that looks at
how technology can be used to improve student achievement
and practice in the classroom and informal-learning environments.
Most of what I do focuses on activities that take place
outside of the classroom, because I believe that, in some instances,
changing a school is like turning a ship. There are some
kids that can’t wait for that ship to turn so they can get access
to new tools at after-school and informal-learning environments.
HENRY KELLY: I’m president of the Federation of American Scientists.
We’re a 52–year–old not–for–profit organization doing
science–policy work. One of our themes is finding technology
opportunities that aren’t being used effectively by the country.
It’s clear to us that we’re not making effective use of technology
that could provide a much richer set of tools for
education. It’s been one of our central themes.
We spent a lot of time defining the research that is needed
to take advantage of this, because we all know it is extremely
hard to fill a lot of the promises we’ve been talking about here.
And we’ve outlined a very detailed road map for research and
have been working hard to get legislation through to start a
major national–research enterprise.
We also are building a series of three different educational
games so that we can begin to learn what we don’t know,
which turns out to be a lot. We have a game for high schoolers
that teaches immunology, called Immune
Attack. And one for younger children about the
fundamentals of phonetics through a game set in ancient
Egypt. And we have one for adults designed to teach incident
commanders of firefighting teams how to manage the complex
set of problems faced in high-rise fires.
MARTINEZ: If information is ubiquitous, who willcontribute
and who will be the purveyors of information?
CLARK: My gut reaction is that it’s everybody. When we look
at how people can become creative in terms of technology or
through technology, like YouTube and wikis, then we get a sense
that knowledge isn’t just going to be reserved to that set of Britannica
encyclopedias in the library. Everyone contributes to
the knowledge space, and everyone has to be critical and be
able to analyze the information that is put forth as a part of
that knowledge space.
It’s one thing to contribute to a wiki, but we also need to
be critical thinkers to be able to spot false or inaccurate information.
I don’t think that the negative part–people adding
false information–should prohibit us from allowing others to
be knowledge creators. I think we just have to be smarter
about how we get people to decide which information is appropriate,
accurate, and relevant given particular situations.
HARRIS: When we talk about contributors of knowledge, it is
about defining what we think is knowledge versus just an
array of information that’s quickly available, and what we
think all of our kids should know coming through an educational
setting versus what they should know how to access, because
our view of knowledge changes. I think there are going
to be multitudes of people who will be the information
providers, but I also think we’re going to have to come to some
consensus about what knowledge is. Is it something that we
all agree on, or is it something in Durham, N.C., that is quite
different from something in Cincinnati, Ohio?
HOUSE: Carl, my reaction to your comment is solid agreement.
Information access is ubiquitous. But knowledge is much
harder to define and find agreement on. I’m struck a little bit
by the Wikipedia findings where, if you look at how many people
access it to gain information as a reader versus those that
contribute knowledge or information, there’s a disparate ratio
of more than 1,000 to one.
I think each or many of us are in the position to contribute
something to the corpus of knowledge, but all of us are going
to be users of that information database. The difficulty with a
Wikipedia experience is that they try to aim for the quick understanding
and they leave out a lot of the nuance because it
tends either to be conflicting or disruptive or argumentative.
And to me, one of the beauties is we’ll be able to handle
knowledge as different for North Carolina versus somewhere
else. You’ll be able to have conflicting knowledge out there to
be examined for the overlap.
KELLY: There are two questions here: How do we create this
knowledge base? And, do we like it or not–this distributed
online knowledge system that is the Web, which is going to be
the dominant source of information for the next generation?
One of the intriguing things is how to define peer review
and expertise in this world. This is one of the skills that people
need to master. Also, [what is] the definition of an amateur,
a professional, a journal, a blog? These boundaries are
beginning to break down. The interesting tension in many of
the communities I deal with is with peer review–if you rely
on three experts to verify the information, are you going to
get a better answer than if you have 10,000 people looking at
it? This is an ongoing debate. In many cases, you get a better
answer if you have more people looking for error.
But having said that, you haven’t defined how you’re going
to create an education. Just turning somebody loose on the
Internet is not an education. And it seems to me incumbent
on educators to define or probably redefine what it is you’re
trying to accomplish in education. But how do you create a
path through this that makes sense? That’s the challenge. And
we haven’t been able to articulate what the goal is.
Now, one of the intriguing things about games and simulations
in this new environment is that you can create a method
for testing some incredibly sophisticated skills. If you’re trying
to overcome a challenge, and you can only overcome that
challenge by acquiring a whole set of information and skills,
then you don’t mind being tested and failing, because you know
that if you keep trying hard enough you can acquire the information
and expertise and overcome that challenge. That’s
a very different approach to learning than memorizing a bunch
of facts and not knowing why you need to know them and
being tested at the end of the year.
MARTINEZ: Do we need to control the flow of information
to students? Some cities or districts have created firewalls so
that students can’t access Wikipedia so they won’t use it as a
form of research. Others have said, "Well, you can use Wikipedia
as a form of research, but it has to be your second or third reference
on a finding."
HOUSE: I don’t think you can stop it fundamentally. And I
think it’s a mistake to stop it. The excitement is when kids do
that kind of exploration on their own. The challenge is for the
teacher to have an effective way to deal with that.
KELLY: To me, the challenge is to create an experience that is
so inherently interesting that you don’t have to worry about
the fact that [students] may be spending some of their time
drifting off [in class] but they know that they need to accomplish
some task that really means something to them. You can get
an amazing amount of time on task.
MARTINEZ: If we know this is what students do and it’s moving
into anytime/anyplace learning, how can we appropriate
that for the good of learning, like we are doing with gaming?
HARRIS: This control of information is almost impossible
within our current system. However, I do believe–at least
within the public-school setting where I am now, and based
on the age of the children that we deal with–we have some
responsibility to control somewhat the flow of information,
to make sure that the information we have and that we are allowing
kids to be exposed to is appropriate and relevant for
what we’re trying to do.
CLARK: I also agree that there need to be some parameters,
meaning we need to determine the outcomes. In early education,
they looked at what skills were needed for people to
become good citizens. We need to define similar skills needed
by students to function in this technology–filled society. It’s
one thing to see students who have all these tools at their
disposal; the next step is to help them figure out how to use
them wisely.
I’ve worked with underserved populations, where we go to
a community and everybody wants to assume that once you
put in a computer lab at a housing project they’ll be okay. The
big issue is, what are the outcomes? What are the goals? That
may not be technology-specific, but we may look at how technology
can help them achieve those goals.
So, if we say we want students to be good collaborators,
what does that mean? And not just with technology, but what
does that mean in general? And how can we get technology
to support and encourage those types of skills so that we
spend less time looking at whether children have specific technology
experiences and more time looking at how those experiences
can contribute to their intellectual and social growth?
MARTINEZ: The elephant in the room is, what do we want students
to be able to learn and do when they finish K–12?
HOUSE: Let me take a shot at that. I think all of us are aware
of the efforts to identify the 21st–century learning skills that
kids are going to need, such as collaboration, verifying the data
you pull off the Web, and a variety of things that we haven’t
taught historically but that are becoming increasingly important
in this cyberspace world. We’ve been helping participate
with a number of those efforts.
KELLY: The standard law of this
sort of thing is that you get what
you measure. Now, if you really
are going to try to teach 21stcentury
knowledge, you need to
be able to test it. You may need
to be able to verify it. If you
watch, for example, how people
collaborate within a multi-player
game, you can actually watch
teens get together and solve problems
as a group.
Can you measure the performance
of the individual and of
the group separately? It is very
hard, but it’s possible. And the intriguing
thing is you don’t have
to stop and take the test. The
gamer expects the test to be going
on continuously. And so, you have this continuous dynamic
system that could make a lot of sense to the student. And I
think it also provides the information you need to confirm that
someone has these 21st–century skills and can work with people
that they never meet and learn things they didn’t already
know and efficiently put them to use.
I think there is a large opportunity here. But again, trying
to take the existing set of rules we have in education and
morph them to these new sets of rules is going to be an extremely
difficult task.
HOUSE: Let me build on that. One of the blocks on the Map
is about kinetic learning. At Stanford Medical School, they
wanted to teach about emergency–room teamwork. The goal
was to build a synthetic world in which every student has an
avatar. The experiment begins with a triage set of cases and then
a patient is to be worked on and may live or die as a function
of what the team does. But the significant piece is that every
avatar is constructed to be archived, so that, post–experiment,
you can go back and talk through each student’s activity under
pressure. The learning is extraordinary. I think this type of thing
can be extrapolated to lower grades.
KELLY: And I think there’s a whole class of people who are turned
off by the formal–education setting. One data point here is provided
by the experience of the Naval Education and Training
Command. They have begun to move away from standard classroom-
lecture formats of fixed duration, where students sit for
eight weeks to learn the material and then take a test. The new
systems are based on performance tests. You pass the course
when you demonstrate an acceptable level of expertise, no
matter how long it takes. The average student meets this standard
in about half the time allocated for the old–style course,
with some taking much less time.
HOUSE: There’s a report called "Leadership in Games and at
Work: Implications for the Enterprise of Massively Multiplayer
Online Role–playing Games," commissioned by IBM
and done by Byron Reeves of
Stanford University and Thomas
Malone of Massachusetts Institute
of Technology. They analyzed
the leadership traits exhibited
in World of Warcraft and
other games and compared them
with what’s being taught at the
classic business schools. So I
think this engagement piece
Henry is getting at–to start
measuring accomplishment–
is on the right track.
MARTINEZ: It seems like we need
to expand people’s ideas about
what learning looks like in the
21st century, and then work to
change those assessments. What
are your thoughts on how to morph to a system that has new
learning outcomes around collaboration, leadership, and content?
Also, what are we going to do about this measurement
trend in our society?
HARRIS: I think we’re going to have to truly embrace projectbased
learning and collaboration, and it’s going to force us to
change the assessments we use. We’re going to have to rely more
on our content experts–our teachers–and others that do
some of the assessments.
CLARK: I think, on one hand, that individual assessment is good,
and having portfolios or projects is a more accurate and authentic
way of assessing knowledge acquisition. But the other
side of it is: How do you assess large numbers of people with
reliability and validity so that you know the assessment is
accurate? I don’t have the answer to that. I just know that whatever
the solution is, it’s going to need to be scalable.
KELLY: I think that the one optimistic thing you can say is that,
to the extent that technology becomes ubiquitous in schools–
including extremely powerful, low-cost simulation and other
devices–you now have the ability not only to deliver this
complex, sophisticated information cheaply and efficiently,
but you also have the ability to undertake sophisticated testing
at an affordable price.
MARTINEZ: I think, similar to what Kevin was just saying
about scalability, we need to look deeply at the local level and
within schools and bring that vision of learning forward so they
can create their own assessment, because we may not ever be
able to scale this. And if we don’t have the political will to do
something besides standardized tests, then we need to dig
deeper with education leaders so this is happening in schools–
even if it’s not going to happen at the state or national level.
These are some really good ideas about how we start turning
the shift in education to respond to the technology and
opportunities that are available to us. Thank you.
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