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Volume 40
Number 8
December 6, 2007 |
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How technology might affect teaching
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| Harvard professor Christopher Dede presented the annual Sara Fine lecture on 21st-century workplace skills. |
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How is work in the 21st century evolving and what can teachers do to prepare students for a future made vastly different by the rise of information and communication technologies?
Harvard education professor Christopher Dede, an expert on learning technologies, visited Pitt last month to deliver a trio of talks on his work and on the integration of new technologies into education.
Dede presented the annual Sara Fine Institute lecture on Nov. 8, drawing more than 70 people to the William Pitt Union Assembly Room to hear him speak on “21st Century Skills, Education and Economic Development for Global, Knowledge-based Workplaces.”
In a talk punctuated by fast-paced video clips, Dede acknowledged the impact that information and communication technologies are having on the way people think and work and examined ways for educators to respond to the changes as they prepare students for work in the 21st century.
Students today are surrounded by cell phones, HDTV, personal digital assistants, word processors, education simulations, the World Wide Web and Internet, interactive TV and plenty of other devices, applications, media and infrastructures.
Thanks to these technologies, the kind of knowledge and skills society demands from graduates is changing. “Information and communication technologies are also changing the way we teach and learn and they’re changing the nature of students of every age who walk into our classrooms because of what they do outside of school,” Dede said.
“What students of every age do outside of academic settings often looks more like 21st century work than what we do inside the classroom settings,” he said. It’s clear that the 21st century is vastly different from the 20th. “How do we respond?”
Dede asked his audience to think back 20 years and compare 1987 with today. “My guess is 2027 will be more different from 2007 than 2007 was from 1987,” he predicted.
A global knowledge-based economy is emerging as the world becomes too complex for individuals to grasp alone, requiring teams of people with complementary expertise to join together to tackle large problems. In addition, change and the pace of change require flexibility and tolerance for uncertainty.
One change Dede noted is that thinking is now distributed. While thought still occurs in one’s head, often it’s distributed with a tool, he said, citing the example of using a computer program to prepare his income taxes.
“The tool did what it does well, which is to multiply numbers accurately and put them on the right line of the form. I did what I do well, which is to come up with creative explanations for the IRS. And so, together we were a good partnership at accomplishing this task,” he said.
Dede said he, like many teachers, uses asynchronous threaded discourses or online forums, noting that today we are thinking as a group, not merely as individuals. “The whole is hopefully more than the sum of the parts as each of us has a piece of the elephant and we try to put that together,” he said.
In pondering how different the future will be from today, Dede pointed to colleague Richard Murnane’s collaborative work with MIT economist Frank Levy on the new division of labor.
They claim, Dede said, that within a generation’s time there will be only two skills remaining that people will do better than machines — expert decision making and complex communications.
In preparing students for that world, Dede noted that children still need to learn fundamentals like reading and numeracy, but programming likewise may become a fundamental skill for them.
Tackling the challenge requires a change in common wisdom about learning. “I think a lot of the fundamental issue here is how you believe children learn complicated things,” he said, arguing for a shift from the behavioral psychology that is the basis of much of today’s education.
Behavioral psychology may sound like common sense in its position that fundamentals must come before more complex ideas, he said. But, he argued, that concept is lethal in education because students get burned out by the drudge of learning simple, apparently disconnected concepts long before they get to the complicated, interesting, relevant concepts that are the goal.
“You can learn simple things in the context of learning complicated things and you learn those simple things now because you see why you might want to know them; because you’re motivated and engaged by the process of learning something that seems to be meaningful,” Dede said.
“I definitely position myself in the group that says you can do something complicated and if you don’t have the simple prerequisites, you’re going to learn [them] in that context,” he said, introducing a pair of his research projects that are based in that approach.
Work in the 21st century will involve taking complicated situations that are too big for one person to understand alone, Dede said. Workers need to be prepared to work out solutions when something is going wrong but the exact issue isn’t apparent and the way to frame the problem isn’t clear at the outset. To prepare for the workplace situations they’re likely to face, students need to learn how to work individually as well as collectively. To sort out the problems they will need to be able to communicate not only face-to-face, but across distances.
Dede’s research projects have taken two approaches toward helping middle school students develop such skills while they learn reading, math and other content.
One he calls an “Alice in Wonderland” environment in which the students interact in a virtual world with other computer-based agents and artifacts.
His team has developed a game-like multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) learning experience in which teams of students move virtual graphical representations of themselves called “avatars” that can walk, run, swim or even fly to gather information and develop hypotheses about an illness that is sweeping the virtual town of River City. The MUVE project aims to teach the students problem-finding and sophisticated inquiry skills along with information on epidemiology, biology, meteorology and more.
The other interface, ubiquitous computing, is almost the reverse, said Dede. In his handheld augmented reality project (HARP), students walk in the real world but carry a virtual world with them in the form of a handheld device — in this case a pocket PC coupled with a GPS device, although Dede said the content soon could be delivered on the equivalent of an iPod or cell phone.
Students are given the scenario that aliens have landed outside their school. Each student plays a role — an FBI agent, chemist, computer expert or linguist, for example — and must solve math and literacy problems to gather the pieces of information their group needs to determine why the aliens have come.
The HARP project aims to improve math skills in ratios, proportions and indirect measurements and literacy skills in Greek and Latin roots in which students were found lacking on state testing. “That’s not deeply compelling material on the surface,” Dede said. “But it turns out the aliens were here last a couple thousand years ago. Greece and Rome were the dominant civilizations, so they speak this odd kind of polyglot of Greek, Latin and English. And the kids love it because they’re learning Alien.” The alien ship that has landed outside the school has left a blast crater and scattered fragments of different sizes and shapes. The fragments and how far they have been thrown must be measured and analyzed so students can learn more about the aliens.
Both approaches try to teach the same sorts of skills. But in one both the student and the world are virtual. That allows deeper immersion, but limits communication because there is the medium itself separating students and their avatars.
In the other, students remain in the real world, so they’re less immersed, but they have the whole bandwidth of real-world communication that can be made more interesting by adding the virtual layer.
In both, it’s not just face-to-face learning that is emphasized, but students also are getting involved in different types of mediated interaction and distributed learning communities.
In each case, Dede said, the model of pedagogy is different from traditional ones.
Instead of giving simpler concepts to students from troubled middle schools, Dede’s plan is to give them more complicated projects that are at the same time engaging and tuned into the younger generation’s learning style. Students learn from one another collaboratively, making it important to pair team members with complementary skills to promote a sort of peer mentoring. “If you’re making up a team, make sure one student can read. Make sure one student likes technology. Make sure one student is interested in science or math or literacy,” Dede said.
It’s not an easy form of pedagogy, he said, noting that at the end of the exercise the knowledge is not inside each individual, but distributed across the minds of the team or the entire class.
“There’s a kind of second stage that has to take place, where over time you help each person carry that knowledge inside of themselves and make it generalizable and transportable,” he said, admitting, “That’s not well understood right now.”
Dede noted that debates about distance education once centered on whether it could compare in quality with face-to-face instruction.
“People used to worry that employers viewed distance ed as inferior. Now I really question whether a student who isn’t fluent in modern media is employable,” Dede said.
“I believe within my lifetime pure face-to-face instruction will be seen as professional malpractice,” he said, likening the practice to a doctor who would rather treat patients with methods he learned in medical school than bothering with newfangled drugs and procedures, or an accountant who thinks today’s tax codes are too complicated, so he chooses to use 2005’s code to do clients’ taxes.
“Other professions somehow feel that they must keep up with the advance of time and yet I have colleagues who say in all seriousness ‘I just don’t do technology,’ as if that were somehow optional given that we now live in a world with things like distributed thinking,” Dede said.
Instructors who grew up without technology must adapt as they face a generation of students who have never lived without computers.
“I think the real issues here are not learning the technology [versus] not learning the technology. When 6 year olds can understand how to use technologies that my colleagues say they find baffling as professors at Harvard, I think it’s pretty transparent in terms of what the real issue is. The real issue is, I think, control of the instructional process. They’re terrified of an instructional process in which the content gets away from them and people are discussing things and Googling stuff that you may not have read and you’ve got to draw on the full range of knowledge of the subject matter every single day in order to stay half a step ahead of the students, instead of delivering your canned lecture and having them sit there and take notes,” he said.
—Kimberly K. Barlow
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