Interdisciplinary Grand Challenges for the Sciences and Technologies of Learning

An ISLS and CSCL Perspective

Alyssa Wise, Simon Fraser University, @alywise

A Pessimistic Snapshot of What’s Wrong with Formal Education Today

Impoverished and/or problematic

understanding about learners and learning

Recalcitrant educational structures,

punitive evaluation systems

Unproductive classroom cultures

Dysfunctional engagement in

formal schooling

Sea of digital information and

informal (learning) interaction

opportunities

Emerging Technologies, Possibilities & Tensions• Rise of large scale learning environments -> opportunities for

personalization and customized collaboration

• Growth of informal learning communities (maker-spaces, youth publication…) -> alternative venues for learning and demonstration of expertise

• Increased data generated digitally (from physical and virtual spaces) -> opportunities for increased analytical insight

• Advances in computational discourse and other methods -> new possibilities for tailored feedback and assessment

What we can build

What is worth building

What we can measure

What is worth measuring

Challenge 1 – Building community in learning spaces in the face of the current emphasis on scaling up and personalization

• Productive classroom cultures and informal communities of practice foster efficacious and engaged learners

• Time for interactive refinement of mental models and knowledge practices, relationships, learners’ voices, agency and ownership key

• Focus on efficiency, economy, individualization and scale threatens the time needed for individual and collective sense-making

• Need for “slow learning”?

Challenge 2 – Keeping formal education relevant in a world where information is everywhere

• Today’s students have greater access to information than ever before (though this alone doesn’t cultivate knowledge, wisdom, understanding)

• Increasing challenges to schools as the primary venue for learning and demonstration of expertise

• Need to cultivate connections that penetrate the classroom walls , how can formal and informal learning become synergistic?

Challenge 3 – Facilitating and assessing learning trajectories (not momentary states)

• Increase in data granularity and temporal analysis techniques create possibilities to transform our paradigms of assessment to look at growth

• Opportunities to thinking about learning pathways not ‘bite sized chunks’

• Important issues of data rights and privacy - what are possibilities + dangers for “electronic learning records”?

• Role for student ownership and agency as learning occurs across contexts, expanding repertoire of ways to demonstrate / document expertise

Challenge 4 – Adapting to increasingly diverse learner populations online and face-to-face

• Immigration and global mobility are making classrooms are increasingly multi-cultural

• Online environments, especially at scale, offer learning experiences to students coming with widely different cultural backgrounds and expectations

• Need for more robust ways to productively take these differences into account

Working Together to Address the Challenges

• Need cross-community transactive memory systems– Staying abreast of increasingly specialized and fragmented research

areas in connection to the big issues that matter

– Respecting our own and others expertise, the boundaries of what we know + where other expertise resides, knowing enough about others’ areas to converse productively

• Building and maintaining bridges– Continue efforts between Computer Science, the Behavioral

Sciences and Design Sciences, foster cxns with Neuroscience

– Be aware of the pressure of big data towards quantitative approaches – how do we integrate with insights from qualitative, mixed methods, and design based research approaches that provide different kinds of valuable insight

One Society?• Would it lead to better progress towards these

challenges? Or hinder efforts?– Reduction of diversity of perspectives, approaches, expertise (or

living in silos)– With greater size, lose important elements of community needed

for collaborations to develop (see challenge #1)– Domination of quantitative methods wont show the whole

picture, keeping these + design-focused folks involved

• Better Question How can we build structures that facilitate researchers participating in and communicating across multiple communities?– Rotating co-location of conferences– Joint journal issues / commentary papers– Cross-community literacy learning opportunities

Image Credit: Modified from cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo of isole di brissago shared by mbeo

Image Credit: Modified from cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo of isole di brissago shared by mbeo

Image Credit: Modified from cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photos of isole di brissago shared by mbeo and Forth Bridge at dusk shared by Hilts uk