In 2010, What Will Be the Research Problems for Computing in Educational Technology?

I helped write an answer to this question a couple years ago (with Peter, Mike, Janet, Amy, and others) for NSF on setting a research agenda for Computer Science in Educational Technology. The report from that effort is at: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/edtech/nsfws/ (HTML) and http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/faculty/mark.guzdial/EDTECH.pdf.

But in this essay, I'm going to take leave to voice my own opinion about where educational technology will be going and what our research problems will be in 2010.

What will schools look like in 2010?

Answer: Much as they do now.

Visionaries in education are always decrying the fact that schools look much the same today as they did in the last century. Actually, the general structure of schooling hasn't changed much in a couple thousand years -- and I don't think that's a bad thing. A bunch of students interacting with a knowledgeable, caring teacher using a shared presentation space (blackboard, whiteboard, Liveboard, whateverBoard) is a really powerful structure for cognitive (and social!) learning.

It's what people do inside of that structure wherein lies the failings of the educational system. Students might be working on a variety of hands-on projects, with some group presentation and discussion and with lots of individual attention. That's a good system that's worked well for several centuries. Or, we could have students work at desks in structured exercises (workbooks or computer-assisted drill-and-kill: atoms or bits, it's still boring) to accomplish easily-testable but real-world-useless facts about 1492 and who Marcus Quintilian was. That's a bad system that hasn't been working for much of this century.

High speed networks, videoconferencing, and tons of gunk on the Web really don't change this picture. I don't hold much hope for videoconferencing in the classrooms. How much of that do we do in our offices? And we're at least ten years ahead of what K-12 classrooms will generally have. Trials at Northwestern University and Virginia Tech with videoconferencing in classrooms have been less than overwhelmingly successful. That's not to say that technology won't have an impact, but it's going to come from enhancing and improving the existing structure, not throwing out schools or teachers. Computers replacing teachers is not a useful goal.

I also predict that Georgia Tech and other University campuses will still be here in 2010, and they'll look much the same, but there will be fewer students here -- only the rich ones who can afford the better quality education from high-bandwidth, face-to-face contact. But there will be lots of students that we'll be working with who will never (or rarely) set foot on campus.

Which leads to the better question...

What will home and school look like in 2010?

That's where I see the real changes in education. Home life isn't segmented into 50 minute period that start and end with bell ringings. At home, students can get sucked into cool projects, can find one another to videoconference, and can really have the great integration of life and learning that John Dewey was talking about when he said "Education is not preparation for life. Education is life."

The really tremendous potential for educational technology is for adults, in many ways.

• At OOPSLA, Adele Goldberg (of PARC, PARCplace, and Neometron fame) made the claim that standalone, working-at-your-own pace learning tools are most effective for adults, who want to learn, have the potential to learn, but fear going into a classroom and looking ignorant in some domain while they are comfortable and intelligent in their own domain.
• Gerhard Fischer of U. Colorado-Boulder has been pushing for years the integration of learning and work. When something stumps you at work, you want the opportunity to learn then, immediately, at your desktop.
• I've been intrigued with the idea of having classrooms in the workplace, that work over time when learning can be most effective, not crammed into two days that are too soon forgotten. I'd love, for example, to be an off-site consultant/teacher for an educational technology development group who would be interested in hearing me give presentations that relate my research to their work and in having discussion sessions that relate their work to the field of educational technology. A month of intense presentations and discussions could be relatively time efficient and lead to great learning, new partnerships, and great fun.

Again: In 2010, What Will Be the Research Problems for Computing in Educational Technology?

I'll take two sets of the things that I see in 2010, and spell out some of what I see as the research questions there.

Ubiquitous Learning Technologies: Forgot the Pilot and the Newton -- TI and HP calculators are the future of classroom technology. It's got to be cheap enough to throw away (because kids will), yet powerful enough for kids to carry about the classroom to serve as a resource ("This kind of plant is an X." "Here's a cool experiment to do with this."), a learning guide ("What might you have done to make that tunnel work better?"), and as a communications tool ("Incoming email from Ms. French..."). The top-of-the-line TI and HP calculators are a fraction of the cost of palmtop computers and are far more powerful than the old education workhorse, the Apple II.

Research questions:

• INTERFACE: How will kids interact with these things? Keyboards will be too small. Handwriting recognition for someone just learning to handwrite? Probably non-WIMP. But what?
• STRUCTURE: What's appropriate to put in a box of that size that can actually be useful to a student? How can the technology structure the students' learning?
• DISTRIBUTED: What goes in the box and what stays in the desktop machine on the wall? How do these devices interact? And what say does the teacher have in the distribution of power/access?

Casual LifeLong Learning: I read something in Time about the Human Genome project. I go on the Web to learn more about it. I realize that I could really use some basic knowledge of genetics to understand. I'm interested, casually, and would be willing to sink a few hours of my free time into a course -- who knows? Maybe I'll become a Bio-X researcher? :-) What happens now? Or, I get a new task at my office job, and I know that it's going to involve, say, insurance actuarial tables. I'd love to learn some statistics so that I can use these knowledgeably, and not just write down the numbers by rote look-up. No, it doesn't help me with this task, but it makes me more valuable in general. How do I fit it in? Where do I start that learning?

Research questions:

• DESIGN/ENGINEERING: We're going to need LOADS of educational technology to make this vision work: From on-line discussion/reading groups, to dial-em-up teachers, to standalone tutorials and multimedia presentations. Mike and I have been realizing that there is no methodology for writing good educational software that has some hope of replicability. What makes good educational software? How do we make more of it? How do we manage the process?
• ACCESS: Maybe I'm not so smart, and I don't realize that what I need to understand the Human Genome project is genetics. How do I find out what I need to find out? What's the keyword search that says "I have no idea who Mendel was, what mitochondria are, and why I should care about receptor points"?
• SOCIAL: What are the structures (both social and technological, and deeply intertwined) that let me find people who want to learn the same things as me, with whom I might learn more through shared effort and discussion, about whom I know nothing, and who are all just as crazy busy as I am? How do we allow this finding and discussing to happen? And what is the collaborative learning software going to look like that allows this to happen in ways that are fun, interesting, engaging, that I want to come back to, and that I get something out of?