Cyberlearning research summit 2012

On January 18th, 2012, some of the most active researchers in the intersection of technology and education came together in Washington DC to share their insights and inspire future inquiries into the subject.

Image from the cyberlearning wiki.

From the Cyberlearning Research Summit Wiki:

In the style of the TED conferences, speakers aimed to:

• Discuss big ideas at the intersection of emerging technology and research on learning;

• Articulate the “transformative potential” of a direction or approach;

• Communicate a sense of the broad research on this topic;

• Engage, inspire, and stimulate thinking in this new program area.

Fortunately for the masses who could not attend, the entire conference was recorded on video and is now available to watch on the cyberlearningvideos youtube channel.

If you don't have the time to listen to the whole thing, I would recommend looking at the following:

• The latter part of University of Chicago's Tom Moher's talk on fifth graders, marinade and science phenomena. Some very cool ways in which relatively simple technology can create engaging and interactive science projects for the classroom.
• This talk by Paulo Blikstein from Stanford's Transformative Learning Technologies Lab showcases educational fabrication labs that were set up in over 50 locations in the US and abroad. The scope of this work, and especially the student projects highlighted in the talk, are simply incredible.
• A beautiful talk by Exploratorium's Jennifer Frazier about how data visualizations can inspire, educate, and serve as discovery tools for any museum visitor. (And how plankton is important and without it you would die.)
• Matthew Easterday from Northwestern University gave a very insightful talk about how civic education is lacking in most engineering programs, why this is a problem, and his research efforts to fix it.
• A bubbly and excited talk by Cathie Norris from University of North Texas and Elliot Soloway from University of Michigan about how technology is used in US classrooms today, why it isn't working, and what we can do different.
• Eric Schweikardt from Modular Robotics talked about simple robotic building blocks, and how they can teach students about robots, programming, and the process by which complexity arises in the world around us.

Discussions of computing and education often take an immediate plunge into forecasts of the future, and many of the talks in this summit went the same route. Observations of technological trends really are beginning to get old, among them the pervasive technological and social connectivity of the newest generation, the coming of big data, and the idea of gamification.

Elliot Soloway and Cathie Norris's talk highlighted the difference between 'supplementing' a classroom with a technology and actually making use of it in an effective way. The same principle applies to research. It is one thing to observe a trend, or to make a demo of a shiny new tech, and then speculate about the effects it might have on a student's education (and I am in no way saying that making those demos is easy). It takes an immense amount of insight and effort to actually connect that innovation to a student and to demonstrate that it resulted in more learning. It is another level entirely to implement the technology as part of an actual curriculum, and to convince students, parents, teachers and administrators that the benefits of the inclusion of this technology outweigh the costs. In other words, to have impact.

Rather than talking about the inevitable technological revolution of education, the talks highlighted above (and several others from the summit) are actual examples of the process. They went the extra mile to put technology at the disposal of actual students, and showed that this achieves something more than was previously possible.