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Partnering with technology
Chris Dede talks about the potentials that can be reached through the proper use of technology. by Heather Clopton SCR*TEC I think that when we talk about systemic reform in education and you hear those visions of 10 years from now, too often the boundary is drawn around the school. People are talking about how we can change the school. And while that's important, I don't think that that can succeed fully by just taking that fraction of a child's life. I think we also have to draw a second boundary for systemic reform around the community. Technology then becomes the bridge between those two.--Chris Dede |
 hris Dede, a recognized leader in the field of educational technology, is
currently a Senior Program Director at the National Science Foundation
(NSF). He has been on leave for a year from his post as a full professor at
George Mason University, where he has a joint appointment in the Schools
of Education and Information Technology & Engineering. He will return to
George Mason in November.His research interests span technology forecasting and assessment, emerging technologies, and strategic planning. He currently has major grants from the NSF and the U.S. Department of Defense to develop educational environments based on virtual reality and distributed simulation. He is a frequent keynote speaker for national conferences, professional associations, and industry workshops. Here, Chris talks about what he sees as the major changes that need to occur in thinking about technology as a tool to enhance education as well as positive developments that he hopes will grow and continue. |
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How did you become involved in technology and what interested
you in this to begin with? I've always been very interested in learning and in understanding how people learn and how to enhance learning. My first exposure to computers was in 1967, when I took a Fortran programming course that involved taking a lot of punch cards down and leaving them for 24 hours, coming back and finding out that the third card from the top got mistyped, and starting over. So I was very unimpressed by computers in learning until about the mid-70s when the small microcomputers began to appear that were interactive. I saw the error of my ways and have been interested since then. But the real fascination hasn't been with the technology, it's been with the kind of things that people can do when they are partners with technology. What kinds of things are you thinking of? Well, I think technology can complement people's individual capabilities, so that it can be an external memory or it can be a way that helps you expand your senses by being able to look across distance or to reach across distance to do something. I think in terms of collaboration, it opens up a lot of power to be able to work with somebody across barriers of distance and time. It's all of those things that expand the definition of human that I find intriguing. I think in particular it's changing the nature of human intelligence. That as machines take over, things that used to be considered hallmarks of intelligence--some of the standardized problem- solving--that then opens up a greater focus in human intelligence on creativity and on affective and moral dimensions, which is where I think intelligence should be defined. So I'm happy to see technology making that kind of change possible. |
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Is your research looking into that kind of creativity and how
technology can complement that as well? The work that I do bears on that to some extent. In the virtual reality work that I am doing, for example, we are having students construct knowledge about things like electromagnetic fields, Newton's laws, or quantum chemistry rather than just presenting them with answers that they memorize and then regurgitate. And that construction of knowledge involves a lot of creative, playful exploration that I think not only grounds what the students learn much more deeply and makes it retained and generalized much better, but it also potentially expands the knowledge. In the work that the National Science Foundation funds, and in having students work with scientists, it isn't simply that some of the good thinking of the scientists rubs off on the students, it's also that some of the creativity and excitement and even the good thinking of the students can rub off on the scientists. |
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When you say construction of knowledge, can you give an
example of what you mean by that? Yes. One example that will be familiar to a lot of people is the use of LOGO, a programming language for learning. We're taught that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees. That's often communicated as presentational knowledge. When you sit down with a LOGO turtle and you're asked to program the turtle to draw a triangle, the mistake that almost everyone makes is to tell the turtle to turn three times and to make sure those turns total 180 degrees. And what you find that you have is an unclosed figure that is essentially half of a triangle, because the interior angles of the triangle must total 360 degrees since it's a closed figure. By constructing knowledge, by actually creating a figure yourself, you learn not only that the interior angles must total 360 degrees, but why they have to do that, and that's much more powerful than somebody telling you that. It makes the knowledge much more useful in the way that the earlier knowledge was misunderstood makes it not useful. The example that you just talked about is a hands-on example. Would this experience have the same learning effect on students if they were doing it virtually? I think that it depends a great deal on the age of the students and their developmental levels. My children attend Montessori school, and certainly the concrete, physical, real, sensory Montessori manipulatives are very important for younger children, and I would be quite nervous if someone were to propose doing all of the Montessori in the virtual world. But I think that what virtual representations can be, especially as kids get older, is a bridge between the concrete of the real world and the abstract of the symbolic, which we increasingly have to deal with as adults. The virtual objects in a sense are transitional between the two. |
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I am sure you've read Todd Oppenheimer's article, "The Computer
Delusion." He says that technology limits creativity, and I was
wondering if you could answer that. Do you find this to be so? First, just to contextualize my response to Oppenheimer's article, let me say that there are gross misstatements of fact in that article. It's really an expertly done hatchet job rather than a piece of journalism. I think that the very quote that you're giving me to respond to is an illustration of that because technology is a medium. So to ask whether technology limits creativity is to ask whether pencils and paper limit creativity or to ask whether a video camera limits creativity. The answer, of course, is it depends on how it's used. If you give people nothing to do with paper and pencil but to fill in worksheets with preassigned problems, then yes, paper and pencil limits creativity. But if you take the same paper and pencil and have them engage in mathematical exploration or in drawing things, then it enhances creativity. In the same way, computers can limit or enhance creativity depending on how they're programmed, and to ascribe that to the computer is silly. The only time in which that would be an appropriate concern would be if the technology is designed to be so limited that it could really be used in only one way. Certainly, it's hard to pound in nails with a screw driver, and it's hard to turn screws with a hammer. There are types of technology, like integrated learning systems, that are sold to schools that really are designed to be used in only one way, and that particular kind of technology, it could be argued, limits creativity. But when you're given a flexible device that can take you in many different directions, it can certainly be used to enhance people's capabilities. |
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"To see technology as magic and automatically good isn't any smarter
than to see it as automatically evil." |
How do you think technology will best be used in schools? What
do you think technology does or will make possible in education,
and do you think it's as urgent as the Clinton administration
believes? First, I'm a little nervous from hearing some of the rhetoric from some of the supporters of technology, just as I am made nervous by the rhetoric from the detractors of technology. To see technology as magic and automatically good isn't any smarter than to see it as automatically evil. I am a little worried by some of the rhetoric in the Clinton initiative that makes it sound like technology is vitamins, and you just sort of put it into schools and then it catalyzes all sorts of things. We know that that's not true. There's a great deal of careful design that has to go into an implementation project if people are going to get a benefit out of technology that is commensurate to the kind of costs and effort that it takes to put it in. I think that the real power of the technology in schools potentially is twofold. First, that it makes accessible kinds of content that are crucial to living and working and being a citizen of the 21st century that you can't get to without the technology there as a support. The other thing that I think technology does is support pedagogy that means that the material is mastered and retained and transferred better by most students than when they're put in a situation of teaching by telling and learning by listening. So, in a sense, the technology in itself doesn't have any power. It's the new kinds of pedagogy and the new kinds of content that have the power. |
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Where do you see evidence that these new ways of learning are
better? I think that is one of the substantial misstatements in the Oppenheimer article. We do have many research projects that have been funded by the NSF that involve the use of technology, not in a laboratory setting, but in real school settings. We're getting back some very powerful research results that show students doing not only better on standardized tests, which measure only a fraction of the skills that people are really going to need in the next generation, but they are also doing better on a number of other indicators. Certainly, student motivation is extremely important for learning, as I think any teacher will tell you, because it increases things like attendance and time on task and concentration. We're seeing some very dramatic evidence in terms of those observable indicators of motivation. We're seeing outcomes like students in middle school able to grasp some of the concepts underlying calculus in ways that were not thought possible before. I think that where the research community has failed is to package that research in a form that's easily accessible to teachers, parents, taxpayers and journalists, and to make those projects accessible so that people can not only read those results, but they can go to Web pages and they can look at what's happening. They can visit the sites, and they can verify for themselves that they find the research results believable. One of the roles that I'm playing at the National Science Foundation is helping them think about how to improve this kind of dissemination so that claims that we just don't have research results to support technology aren't plausible anymore. |
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Is there anything at the NSF Web site yet that people can look
at? There's a lot of stuff at the NSF Web site, because not only does the NSF Web site contain all of the program funding guidelines, but it contains all of the projects that are currently being funded. Many of those project descriptions contain links to the project Web sites. The NSF Web site is set up with a site-wide search engine so that if you're interested in say mentoring, you can do a search for all of the projects that involve telementoring and then follow the links to some of those project Web sites and get a feel for what they are really doing, what they've published and whether or not they're looking for additional schools or teachers that may cooperate and so on. It's not as transparent as it should be, but much of the information is there and available. |
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What would you tell a teacher in a school where there is not
much support for technology who really believes that using the
technology in the way you've been talking about, to support
collaborative, constructive kinds of learning, is a good thing.
How do you think she can best present her case to the
community and to other teachers to get the funding needed? I think a lot of it involves collecting examples of schools that are similar in size, similar in student population, similar in community, similar in the level of funding that's available. In other words, kind of matching themselves to other districts that are doing a lot more with technology and are succeeding with technology. Then using those as case studies to say, "Hey, we can do this, too, and we don't need to double the amount of money that is being paid into the school, or do something else that's impossible for us. They did it and we can follow and learn from their successes." There is enough technology happening in the country now that almost any district can find other districts that are good models to follow. For example, the NSF has not only statewide systemic initiatives that try to organize innovation within a state, but rural systemic initiatives and urban systemic initiatives, so that those two kinds of districts that often have more trouble funding technology or developing innovation than, say, the wealthier suburban districts do, can find through those initiatives other comparable districts and classrooms that are succeeding with technology within the existing structure of their resources and their community. |
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"Making internal visions the primary driver of change ... is a way to help
facilitate the process [of redistributing money for technology]." |
When you say within the existing structure, you mean they didn't
ask, "Where can we get more money," but, "How do we
redistribute the money that we have?" I think that both kinds of issues are important. But perhaps the second issue of how do we redistribute the money that we have is more important for a couple of reasons. One is that there are real questions of sustainability when you're doing something that can only work as long as there is a stream of external funding, because funding agencies don't want to get into that situation. They want to provide something that primes the pump. Then the pump is capable of functioning on its own, and the funding agency moves on. The other is that often there really isn't a commitment on the part of a district to change unless it's cost-sharing, unless it's changing its own structures to make the project sustainable. That kind of commitment can be very important in obtaining external funding. So I think it is a matter of creatively looking for sources of external funding, but not making that the primary driver of change--making internal visions the primary driver of change and then using external money where you can get it is a way to help facilitate the process. The primary issue isn't whether or not the district wants to make the commitment to technology. The primary issue is whether the district wants to make a commitment to preparing 21st century workers and citizens. If it does, and it looks seriously at the kind of content that is required and the kind of pedagogy that is required, then you come to the technology as part of that overall, larger, redesign process. The districts that try to short cut and say that the goal is to have a multimedia, Internet-capable computer in every classroom ... risk ... end[ing] up getting that and no one quite knows what to do with it. Is that what you see happening? I think I see a lot of that happening, and I find it disturbing. There is a lot of first generation thinking about technology that just sees technology as like fire--you stand near it, you get a benefit from it. That isn't how it works. It's improvements in learning that have to be the objective, and technology becomes a means to that end. |
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Do you see this change in thinking about technology that you're
talking about occurring, from first generation to--do we need to
go to second generation thinking about technology? The category system that I use, which is just my way of thinking about it, is that the first generation thinking sees the technology itself as the innovation. Second generation thinking says, "No, technology is a means to an end, but it's an automation. It's power is in automation, and so we take presentational teaching and do it faster with technology." Which I think is also a dead end. It isn't until you get to third generation thinking, where you say, "No, the whole point is to innovate rather than to automate to do things that you couldn't do before." It isn't until you get to that point that I think you get to where thinking about technology needs to be. |
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Have you had much contact with teachers and students and
schools lately? Yes, I have a lot of contact with them, both in my academic life through working with my own students and the surrounding districts and as a consultant working with districts around the country. This year, as an NSF program officer, through site visits and interactions with the different projects that we're funding, I have met with many students and teachers. |
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Based on your contact with students and preservice teachers and
schools and districts, how do you think schools are moving
toward that third generation of thinking? Are higher education
programs in education leading the way, or is that direction
coming through professional development? Do you see much of
that kind of thinking occurring? I see it happening more slowly than I would hope, but I do see it happening. But I think a lot of it is happening not so much because of the dissemination of ideas about technology, but because more powerful research ideas about learning are beginning to move into the educational community. They're coming out of cognitive science. They're coming out of advances in neurology and biology. As those ideas about learning become part of education, then people start to see the limitations of the current model of teaching. In looking for ways that teachers can enhance learning without killing themselves, they come to technology as a way to think about it. It isn't happening as directly as I would like, but I do see it taking place. One of the resources that's going to be available soon, is something that I edited, the 1998 yearbook for the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, which has hundreds of thousands of members, many of them key decision-makers in districts--principals, supervisors, curriculum coordinators, assistant superintendents. Because the ASCD makes that a membership benefit, about 100,000 educators are going to receive that yearbook for free at the start of next year. The whole topic of the yearbook this time was learning with technology, and it speaks to the themes that we're describing. I think that's going to be a valuable resource book for people. |
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In 10 years, how do you think classrooms will be different? One of the biggest changes potentially in 10 years is something that I call distributed learning, in which the full burden of instruction isn't confined anymore to the walls of the school, but, instead, a substantial amount of what kids learn takes place in home settings and workplace settings and community settings outside of the classroom. The teacher becomes sort of an orchestrator of learning experiences, some of which come over television, some of which come on video games, some of which come on things like WebTV--all of the elaborate infrastructure of entertainment and information services that's starting to appear in homes. And what happens is that instead of classrooms getting bogged down with this incredible business of just presenting kids with the basics of information and getting them excited about what they're seeing and wanting to know more, some of that basic presentation and some of that building of motivation takes place outside of the school. Then when kids come to school, they already know something, but they don't really understand it. They're excited about it, but they're not sure how to channel that motivation. Then the classroom becomes the very rich kind of interpretive environment and exploratory environment that is really the best of teaching and where teachers can really shine. I think that when we talk about systemic reform in education and you hear those visions of 10 years from now, too often the boundary is drawn around the school. People are talking about how we can change the school, and while that's important, I don't think that that can succeed fully by just taking that fraction of a child's life. I think we also have to draw a second boundary for systemic reform around the community. Technology then becomes the bridge between those two. |
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I've read what you've said before about technology and the gap it
creates between the haves and the have-nots. You say the gap
will initially be large and then get smaller. Do you still think
that's happening or going to happen, and do you think in 10 years
the gap will have gotten smaller instead of larger? Because it
sounds like that is the kind of reform necessary if we're going
to have parents online and e-conferencing. If your vision of
schools 10 years from now materializes, the people who don't
have that technology will fall even further behind. I think that there are structural reasons why we will have the potential to close the gap within 10 years. The power of technology keeps advancing and the cost keeps declining in a way that even poor families and rural families will have access to devices within 10 years that today are very powerful and expensive. The kind of graphic supercomputer in my virtual reality work today that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars will be under the Christmas tree for kids in 8-10 years. Whether that potential will be realized or not depends on how we choose to act on it. I think that's a matter of not only focusing on access and how to make sure that these kids have access to the devices--they understand what an operating system is and how to turn on the machine and how to use a Net browser--but a lot depends on content of the services.There must be learning experiences open to these children that are compelling to them rather than necessarily compelling to people ... of [the] majority culture. It's creating more of those kinds of opportunities and services for people from every culture that's going to help bridge the gap. |
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"... with good design, we can get a lot of
leverage for learning using virtual reality." |
Finally, I wanted to ask you about your research. What are you
working on right now? Personally, I'm working on trying to understand how to take things that are intangible and very difficult to understand, like quantum mechanics, like forces that act across distance, gravity, electromagnetism, and make them accessible to all learners by creating kind of magical worlds that students can enter in which things that are invisible are visible, in which things that are intangible become able to be heard and touched. Most of our brain is sensory processing system--that's how we make sense out of the world around us, and if we can take things that are abstract and make them perceptible using things like virtual reality technology, then I think we could move some very complicated subject matter much earlier into the curriculum, teach it to a much broader range of learners, and have a more sophisticated citizenry able to make decisions about some of these crucial scientific areas. I'm busy exploring the potential of VR to do this, and we're getting some very exciting results from this work that suggests for some subjects that are very hard, with good design, we can get a lot of leverage for learning using virtual reality. Do you spend much time in that VR environment? It's a little like Lawnmower Man. We put on head mount displays and different kinds of computerized clothing so that you can sense them. I spend some time in it. Do you enjoy that? I find it enjoyable. It's not something that would draw me out of the real world extensively. It's not better than the real world. It's different, and it's a little like Alice walking through the looking glass. You don't want to stay in the other reality, but it helps you to gain insights into our reality when you come back to it. |
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Read Chris Dede's responses to six challenges for
educational technology. Learn more about his work in virtual reality. Visit the National Science Foundation's Web page. The views expressed by Chris Dede do not represent the official views or policies of the National Science Foundation. |
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