The Present and Future of Educational
Technology:
An Interview with Christopher Dede
Christopher
Dede is the Timothy E. Wirth
Professor in Learning
Technologies at
Harvard University, where he
conducts research on
"emerging
technologies for learning and
infusing technology
into large-scale educational
improvement."
He holds a Ph. D. in
education from the University of
Massachusetts
at
Amherst.
Interview Topics
Scientifically rigorous
data on educational
technology
Most
effective uses of technology
to enhance learning
Examples of
technology in K-12 education:
Simcalc and
Biologica
Studies that show
technology effectiveness and 'the
conditions for success'
Adapting
educational technology for use in the
classroom
Creating conditions for
success and Milwaukee's
Curriculum Design Assistant
How technology
can expand and replace current forms of
student-learning
assessment
Universal design
Dede's research on interfaces between people and
technology: Milwaukee and Internet 2
The
virtual world of
"River City"
Ubiquitous
computing: Innovative uses for handhelds
Links for further investigation
Alan Feldman, former
Project Director at TERC in
Cambridge, MA, spoke to Dr.
Christopher
Dede on March 4, 2004 at
Harvard University. Their meeting
began
with a discussion of
scientifically rigorous data on the uses
of
educational
technology.
DEDE:
I think that it's hard
to find scientifically rigorous data on a lot
of innovations in
educational technology because the field is moving
so fast. By the
time that something is validated it may be 6, 7, or
8 years old--at
which point it's no longer best practice because the
technology has
moved forward, our insights about learning have moved
forward. And
so, we are in a position where to give students the
most that we can,
we need to work with things that have reasonable
evidence behind
them, but not necessarily are proved beyond the
shadow of any
possible doubt.
Top
FELDMAN:
So, Chris, let me just start
on top of this list here with the
questions, and we can elaborate it
apart from this as the time
allows. In your own opinion and,
generally speaking, what are the
most effective uses of technology to
enhance
learning?
DEDE: Well, first, I think
that
the most important function of schools is to prepare kids for
the
21st century. And the recent work at the Partnership for 21st
Century Skills has documented that there's a whole set of cognitive
and affective and social skills that really weren't central for an
industrial economy or an agricultural economy that now are at the
heart of the emerging global knowledge-based workplace--and being a
citizen in a very complex civilization. And...so, to me what's
important is that students come out with those skills.
Now, I know
that that's different than the conventional wisdom of saying that
students should know everything in the standards and then they'll be
well prepared for the rest of their lives. To put it in context, I
hold an endowed chair at Harvard in a field in which I've taken
exactly one course. It was a course in a programming language that
no longer exists and I took it on punch cards, so obviously it
wasn't
a lot of help to me in terms of preparing. And while that
story--even in my generation--isn't unusual, it's certainly going to
be a very typical story in the generation that we're educating now
in
schools.
We don't really know what content those students are
going to need. I suspect that detailed new knowledge of the content
and the standards--some of it will be important where there are core
skills that are involved. Other content will dramatically change by
the time the students might use it. So then if you ask what are
the
most effective uses of technology in the school, the most
effective
uses of technology center around engagement. Because if
kids don't
come out of school caring deeply about learning and
knowing and able
to collaborate with others in doing that, they are
not going to be
well prepared no matter
what facts and skills
they've memorized.
They center around reflective skills like
learning how to learn,
being able to prioritize and filter
information--the things that the
Partnership for 21st Century Skills
talks about. And there's
something new and something old about
that report. The old part
about it that's very reassuring is that
we've had a series of reports
on what the students need to be
prepared for the future, beginning in
the early 1990s with the SCANS
(Secretary's Commission on Achieving
Necessary Skills) report, going
through the National Center on
Education and the Economy report in
the mid-nineties.
And every
report describes more or less the same
skills despite the enormous
changes that have taken place in society
over about a 15-year period.
So that's very reassuring, because it
says that these skills aren't
some sort of a fad or a temporary
understanding, but they really are
foundational for where we're
going. But the part that's different
about this new report is that
it identifies fluency in technology as
being central to having those
skills: that you don't really know how
to collaborate unless you
also know how to collaborate across
distance; that you don't really
know how to filter information if you
can
use a library, but you
don't know how to use the Internet. It's
a "both and" type of a
situation. And so I think that the powerful
uses of technology take
content from the standards, especially core
content that helps
students to understand the deep parts of the field
or how a field
relates to other fields, or how ideas within the
standards are
interconnected, links those into these 21st Century
higher-order
skills that we're talking about, and links the
technology in as a
kind of amplifier that lets you learn the content
faster and lets
you master the skills more deeply. That's a very
long
answer.
Top
FELDMAN: That's a very, very
nice
answer. The word "amplifier" there at the end stands out, of
course, as
being critically important, and maybe when you answer this
question,
you can respond: Could you give a couple of concrete
examples of the
uses of technology in K-12 education? Maybe the
term, the way, the
sense in which technology as an amplifier can
come out that
way?
DEDE: Well...one of
the projects
that I helped to fund when I was senior program
director at NSF for a
year in the mid-nineties was Simcalc,
the Jim Kaput project,
that takes qualitative calculus, the
mathematics of change, and moves
it from the college level to the
middle school level. Actually, as a
pre-cursor to algebra, rather
than algebra as a gatekeeper for
something else and then a
gatekeeper for something else, and
eventually you get to calculus.
Because a part of mathematics that
we do all use in everyday life is
understanding qualitative change.
And it's very impressive that
Simcalc has
been able to
engage, not just students labeled
as gifted and talented, but all
types of students in learning
powerful mathematics using technology
as a way to make it concrete
and experiential rather than purely
abstract and symbolic. So, that
to me captures a number of
dimensions of technology as an amplifier.
It's starting with skills
that are very important in everyday life,
but that are relatively
advanced skills, that are skills that one
doesn't ordinarily think of
most middle school students being able
to understand. It uses a
particular strength of technology and, in
this case, the strength of
technology is being
able to make
intangible things experiential.
And, it helps to build these kinds
of 21st century skills because the
pedagogy that is used is
project-based, student-centered, active
learning rather than these
sort of second best, assimilative
learning, teaching by telling,
learning by listening approach that
too often is all of what
students get in school, rather than a part
of what students get in
school.
FELDMAN: Is
there a second piece
like that that you'd like to point to,
Chris?
DEDE: Well, again if you look at
curricula that really have a track record behind them, I think that
the Biologica curriculum out of the Concord Consortium,
which again was funded by the National Science Foundation. I helped
to participate in the early funding, it's available for free, on the
internet. It takes college-level genetics and evolutionary biology,
puts it into the early high school years. Does so in a very
engaging
way, kids get to breed dragons, and to have a feel for how
genetics
work through that, and builds these kinds of higher-order
skills, in
this case using visualization technologies to help
kids
playfully
explore aspects of biology that would ordinarily take
extremely
expensive scientific equipment to make accessible. So
those are just
representative, I think, of a larger class of
projects, often that
have been done with federal research funding,
that combine
sophisticated pedagogy, deep content that actually goes
well beyond
the minimum proficiencies that the high-stakes tests are
looking for,
and student engagement that leads them to be able to
master the deep
content and the skills, because perhaps the biggest
barrier to
minimum proficiency isn't so much ignorance as it is the
fact that
the students simply don't
care--and don't see any reason
in how
they're taught that would lead them to care.
Top
FELDMAN: Are there studies that
indicate effectiveness for the uses of technology that you
mentioned?
So you gave us a sort of a broad view. How do you read
the research
literature on this?
DEDE: I
think that
there are many studies that indicate that these
technologies are
effective: specific studies for Biologica
and
Simcalc, more generalstudies like the synthesis that
WestEd
did--a meta-analysis of many different kinds of studies, but
the key
to understanding the research literature is understanding
conditions
for success. One way to think about conditions for
success is to
think about medicine rather than education. Imagine
what would
happen if you took a vial of antibiotics and dropped it
out of an
airplane into a Stone Age culture. Without any
instructions other
than "this is good for your
health,"
some people would put
the vial on an altar and worship
the vial; some people would open the
vial, grind up the pills, smear
it all over their bodies; some people
would take all the pills at
once; probably relatively few would take
one pill every 4 to 6
hours; but that's the conditions for success
for antibiotics: a very
powerful medical intervention that's
relatively useless outside of
those conditions for success. And so
when people do clinical trials
on antibiotics, they don't measure
when antibiotics are improperly
used, they measure when the
conditions for success are present for
antibiotics. Did they then
help the disease? And the great
thing
about medicine is that you
have things like inoculations for it. It
doesn't matter what your
native language is, what your parents'
income level is, what you
believe or don't believe, you just get the
shot and it works. There
is nothing like that that's true for
learning. Every kind of
educational innovation, whether it is
technology-based or not, has
conditions for success. And so the
question is, when you look at the
research literature, are you
looking at a situation where the
conditions were successfully met,
and so we can legitimately ask,
"Was the technology
effective?" Or are we looking at a
situation where the
conditions for success
were not met and so no
one would expect
something to happen--even if the intervention is a
good one. And
that's why I think a lot of the research literature is
so clouded.
Because people are looking at flawed interventions both
with
technology and in other aspects of education, and somehow
counting
those as if they were proofs that the technology wasn't
effective.
But where you look at the literature on the conditions
for success
and where the technology is building on the strengths of
technology,
it's not just automating instruction; it's not just
teaching with
PowerPoint instead of using a blackboard; or giving
students
electronic worksheets
instead of paper worksheets. But it's
actually innovating instruction, bringing in powerful content,
teaching in a way that involves active learning, building on
particular strengths of the technology. Then I think the literature
is very encouraging in terms of research, about what the power for
technology is. And so the central question, I think, is not so much
"Is technology effective?" The central question is
"Can we reliably create the conditions for success for
technology within schools? Can we do the implementation
right?"
And that is a tough question. Because the conditions
for success in
education are not simple, as they are in
medicine.
Top
FELDMAN: So let me go to some
of
that literature. Are there pieces of literature that you'd
like
to cite...,
Chris?
DEDE: I can send you
things...
FELDMAN: And we invite you to
cite
your own literature, of course.
DEDE:
I can
send you, you know, things that I think...document, in
general, the
effectiveness of technology, but I think that there is
a lot
of...literature out there on best practices with technology of
different types. And I am not sure that giving people
cookbooks...When teachers are looking to adapt an innovation done
elsewhere to their own purposes, to modify it, to shape it, take
ownership of it, they are typically starting from a problem of some
sort that they have: "My kids could care less about the
subject." "My kids can't read very well." "My
kids are at the 4th grade level in Math and I'm teaching 9th
grade," etc. And what they're
looking for is something
specific that they can adapt to that problem. The analogy would be
to
cooking, where you say to yourself, "I'm hungry. What am I
hungry for tonight? Is it steak, is it Chinese, is it, you
know, vegetarian?" And then once you decide what you're hungry for
you
either pick a restaurant that's going to serve that to you or
you go
to the kind of cookbook where you can look up a specific
recipe
that's going to help you out. So I think that what's limiting
about
simply saying, "Here is what research tells us about
effective
technologies," is that teachers already have a
curriculum, they
already have a sense of their own capabilities,
they already have a
specific set of kids that they are working
with. And they are more
looking for something powerful that they can
adapt than they are
looking for a sort of generic source of things
that other people have
done, like a cookbook. So, that's why I am
not sure that lists of
reports that cite the effective research
literature necessarily lead
to a lot of adaptations in practice.
Top
FELDMAN: All right. Is there
anything that you'd like to cite that...I'm going back to your very
important point about when it's all done right...can we reliably
create conditions for success? Is there any work done in that vein
that you think of in your own mind as "that researcher had the
question right"?
DEDE: I think that
there...has been excellent work done in that vein. I think in
particular Barbara Means at SRI is someone who has thought a lot
about this, and in her evaluations of the Globe Project--that received
a lot of federal funding, was implemented all over the world--
that's research that takes very careful account of conditions for
success and interpreting the results that came out. And that's all
on
the Web and accessible.
I think that in general, though,
there
is sort of a shortfall between what I described as what
practitioners
look for when they say, "I want research on
things that are
effective" and what researchers generate when
they generate
journal articles or conference talks on things that
they're doing
that are effective. I've been working with the
Milwaukee public
schools. They have developed a really neat part of
their teacher
professional development
portal called "The
Curriculum Design
Assistant." And, in the Curriculum Design
Assistant experienced
expert Milwaukee teachers have developed
lessons that are tailored to
Milwaukee's content and Milwaukee's
rules to Milwaukee's students.
And then these lesson plans, video
excerpts from the classroom,
student products, teacher reflections
are put on the web. And so
somebody else in Milwaukee that's
wearing the same shoes, but in a
different school
or a different
classroom can go to the Curriculum
Design Assistant and they can see
something that's there, that has
been validated through the
knowledge of practice. So these lessons
are screened by a team that
manages the Curriculum Design Assistant.
You have to supply
information about its effectiveness; it's subject
to the judgment of
your peers in terms of whether this is worthy of
being disseminated
throughout the district. And that knowledge
of
practice is not to
be taken lightly. However, it's not the kind of
statistically
significant controlled-study knowledge that would
necessarily appear
in a research journal. And the kind of
statistically significant
control-research models that appear in
research journals don't
typically end up being translated into
something like the Curriculum
Design Assistant. Where you say, now
here's my quantitative findings
and my qualitative findings and now
let me create this kind of a
tool where you can see the lesson
plans, you can see somebody
teaching it, you can see student
products, you can see their
reflections on it. Here are some
experienced practioners that have
some thoughts about what the
conditions for success on it are.
There's a shortfall between the
knowledge of researchers and the
knowledge of practioners in that
middle ground. And, it's not an
easy thing to do because it takes
resources
to create something in
that, to bridge that chasm. And yet
that's really what's needed if
we're going to be able to talk about
something that is validated
both by practioners and by
researchers.
Top
FELDMAN: Chris, there's a question
that's a bit of a potpourri here, so we'll see what pieces that
we've
already tackled. The question is how do your thoughts about
technology-supported constructive learning, relate to
each of the following: one is the current call for standards-based
curriculum, I think you really covered that nicely earlier with your
comments about bringing that together with 21st century skills. The
second
one is assessment of student learning, and the third one is
universal design. So, would you want to comment on...assessment and
then universal design?
DEDE: I had the
privilege of serving on the National Research Council Committee on
Educational and Psychological Foundations and Assessment, which was a
follow-on committee to the "How People Learn" group that
generated a very successful report synthesizing a whole generation
of
work in cognitive science and neuroscience and education in
psychology on learning. And our charge as a committee was to build
on
that work in terms of what those models
of learning might need
for
assessment. And I don't think that our report was as successful
in
terms of public impact. But I do think that the report can be
mined
for a lot of interesting case studies about not just
assessment in
general, but technology in assessment in particular.
And...the big
headline that came out of that work, which I certainly
believe, is
the power of technology and assessment centers on
something that
should be the focus of
assessment anyway, which is
diagnostic
informative assessment that gives teachers information
and students
information about what is succeeding and failing on the
spot, when
there is time to change the teaching and learning that's
going on to
make it better. Rather than summative sort of drive-by
assessment
that tells you too late whether you succeeded or failed.
And, in
fact, the committee talked about the idea that in the
future,
technology might be able
to replace many forms of summative
assessment by aggregating formative assessments into something
that--over time--would give you the same information that a
summative
test might, but that would at the same time provide the
sort of
diagnostic formative feedback that teachers and students
need on a
continuous basis. And the analogy, which is admittedly
flawed, is to
something like a supermarket. When you go up to the
scanner to check
out of the supermarket,
a lot more happens than
simply the scanner
keeping track of the items and presenting you
with the bill. The
scanner monitors the inventory in the store and
notes what's been
bought, so the store always knows its inventory
without counting. The
scanner keeps track of your personal
preferences, so that then you
get...if you buy dog food you get
deluged with junk mail about dog
food and so on. So the same data
is used in many different ways. And
that's the
power--potentially--of technology in assessment; it's to
collect
on-the-ground, just-in-time data about learning, but then in
many
different ways to have it at decision making. From the decision
making of the teacher about what to do about Johnny tomorrow
morning,
to the decision making of a principal about which of two
curricula to
use in the school, to the decision making of the state
superintendent
about whether a particular teacher development
program is
succeeding
or failing. So that's what I think the
promise of technology and
assessment is. And, unfortunately, I think
that we've been derailed
into looking too much at how technology can
automate summative
assessments and tasks and not enough about what
technology can do
with formative assessments.
Top
FELDMAN: And let's go on then
to
universal design.
DEDE: Why, I just have
enormous admiration for the work that is going on in universal
design. It's terrific to have David Rose as one of my colleagues
here. And I think CAST (The Center for Applied Special Technology)
and groups like CAST are doing a tremendous job with thinking
through
what it really means to have online materials and, for that
matter,
tangible manipulatives that speak to all of the different
learning
styles that we see within students now. It's a very
challenging form
of design. I know that I struggle to accomplish
that in my own work,
and yet it's clear that if we are going to
achieve providing
educational opportunities for every student,
it
can only be by
starting with...where they are, in what their
strengths are, rather
than trying to optimize some sort of "one
size fits all"
design approach. And so I see it as very
promising, very difficult,
and a big opportunity for the field if we
can learn how to do it
well.
Top
FELDMAN: Let me just wrap up with
this
issue. Is there work of your own, Chris, that we'd like to
include
here and cite? You can give me a few pieces now and follow
up
with--however you want to give it to
me.
DEDE: ...Two of the sets of work are
pretty well documented, and one is not. So I can print out...two of
the pieces. The third one I'll have to wave my hands more about
because we don't have a good Web site for it yet. A lot of my work,
but not all of it, centers on emerging technologies--trying to sort
out which things are the golden goose and which are the wild goose
in
terms of what they might mean for learning and teaching and
schooling. And, I think over the next decade, we're going to see
three different kinds of interfaces between people and technology
complement one another in terms of education. And I'm doing
research
on each of those three
interfaces: one of them is the
conventional
world to the desktop interface, where you sit at a
workstation or a
laptop and you bring distant experts and distant
archives to you. And
there the frontier is things like Internet 2,
which is a much more
powerful form of the Internet that brings with
it capabilities like
free high-bandwidth video conferencing. I have
research ongoing with
Milwaukee where the content of the research is
that people in Boston
are helping them design a professional
development portal for the
district, especially for new teacher
induction and retention. And
the process of the research is that
we're doing 90% of that
partnering with
Milwaukee across distance.
So we're studying...using Internet 2 bandwidth and
different kinds of
groupware tools and video-conferencing tools. We
can do design across
distance, we can do implementation across
distance, evaluation and
research across distance. And I think
that's very powerful and
interesting because many local districts
don't have a strong local
partner to help them with design and
research. And what we're finding
is that for 90% of the work, we can
accomplish that cross-distance.
That opens up, I think, many
opportunities. I don't have a good Web
site on that, but I have some
articles on that that I can show
you.
Top
[Interruption to recording. Dede begins discussing the second
interface, a virtual world called "River City".]
... They're helping to sort out a very complex pattern of disease within River
City, using higher-order thinking skills like hypothesis formation
and experimental design. But we've created the world in such a way
to
make it very much like the Internet games that students are used
to.
Because we particularly want to reach the bottom third of the
students. Students who are under-performing and unengaged, but who
have a lot of potential if they're just taught in a way that speaks
to their learning style and that motivates them. So, we're getting
some very interesting and encouraging results back from our work
with
River City. Both about this kind of interface
being practical
in
schools and also about its being engaging and leading to learning
for
students. And we are moving to large-scale implementations of
that to
do statistical analyses this spring and next fall.
Top
The 3rd interface is called "ubiquitous
computing". And it's infusing the virtual world throughout the
real world by using wireless handhelds to carry the virtual world
around with you, if you will. We have a couple kinds of projects
going on there. On the low end, I have a grant from the provost at
Harvard to take a suite of wireless handhelds and use them in ten
different ways in ten different School of Education classes.
Pro-ware
in the science methods, graphing calculators in the math
methods,
digital cameras in the arts methods, sketching and beaming
software
in the statistics, and so on. And we're again learning how
much one
can accomplish with suites
of handheld devices. I am also
partnering with Eric Klopfer, who is head of the teacher education
program at MIT, to build on some very interesting work he's done
with
hand helds to superimpose virtual problems on real world
settings. He
has a couple simulations: one is called Environmental
Detectives. You
wander around the actual MIT campus but your
handhelds tell you
about a virtual chemical spill on the campus and
you can drill
virtual wells, you can interview virtual people, you
can access
virtual kinds of resources, and you can try to understand
this
problem, taking advantage of the fact that you're physically
walking
through a real world setting.
And so we are studying the
strengths
and the limits of that.
So I think that these
three
interfaces are all dynamically changing in ways that may be
powerful
for education. And as researchers, we're trying to
understand: What
are strengths of each? What are the limits of each?
What are the
conditions for success? And, is it practical--from an
implementation
standpoint and a financial standpoint--to think about
moving these
into schools?
Top
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Investigation
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