Online High Schools Test Students' Social Skills
Thursday, October 1st, 3:30-5:00pm in 252 Erickson
All around us people are learning with the aid of new technologies:
children are playing complex video games, workers are taking online
courses to get an advanced degree, students are taking courses at
commercial learning centers to prepare for tests, adults are consulting
Wikipedia, etc. New technologies create learning opportunities that
challenge traditional schools and colleges. These new learning niches
enable people of all ages to pursue learning on their own terms. People
around the world are taking their education out of school into homes,
libraries, Internet cafes, and workplaces, where they can decide what
they want to learn, when they want to learn, and how they want to learn.
The developments described above are changing how people think about education। This rethinking will take many years to fully penetrate
our understanding of the world and the society around us। To be successful,
leaders will need to grasp these changes in a deep way and bring the
government’s resources to bear on the problems raised by the changes
that are happening. They will have to build their vision of a new
education system around these new understandings. The rethinking that is
necessary applies to many aspects of education and society. We are
beginning to rethink the nature of learning, motivation, and what is
important to learn. Further the nature of careers are changing and how
people transition back and forth between learning and working. These
changes demand a new kind of educational leadership and changing roles
for government. New leaders will need to understand the affordances of
the new technologies, and have a vision for education that will bring
the new resources to everyone.
Bio: Allan Collins is Professor Emeritus of Education and Social Policy at
Northwestern University. He is a member of the National Academy of
Education, and a fellow of the American Association for Artificial
Intelligence, the Cognitive Science Society, the American Educational
Research Association, and the American Association for the Advancement
of Science. He served as a founding editor of the journal Cognitive
Science and as first chair of the Cognitive Science Society. He has
studied teaching and learning for over 30 years, and written extensively
on related topics. He is best known in psychology for his work on how
people answer questions, in artificial intelligence for his work on
reasoning and intelligent tutoring systems, and in education for his
work on situated learning, inquiry teaching, design research, and
cognitive apprenticeship. From 1991 to 1994 he was Co-Director of the US
Department of Education’s Center for Technology in Education.
LARC Co-Director and Principal Investigator Nell K. Duke, an Associate Professor of Teacher Education and Educational Psychology, was awarded the 2009 AERA Early Career Award. The award honors a scholar who has conducted a distinguished program of cumulative educational research in any field of educational inquiry within the first decade following receipt of their doctoral degree. For more information about Dr. Duke's research contributions, click here.
LARC Principal Investigator Guofang Li , an Associate Professor of second language and literacy education at Michigan State University, was recently interviewed by the European Urban Knowledge Network (EUKN) about the 'rainbow underclass,' a term she coined in her book Culturally Contested Literacies, as a multicultural group of people, including poor whites, living in U.S. urban neighborhoods. To read more about Li's research on the EUKN, click here.
Do men and women use the Internet differently? LARC researcher Rand Spiro responds to this question in a Washington Post article on learning, gender, and the Internet. Read Spiro's thoughts at: The Online Male Takes a Licking and Keeps on Clicking.
The Millennials: The Dumbest Generation or the Next Great Generation?
Betsy Baker, Professor of Literacy Education at the University of Missouri--Columbia, hosts a bi-weekly series of podcast interviews with literacy researchers who discuss the implications of their research for teachers, parents, principals, and policymakers. Titled Voice of Literacy, the website offers podcasts that provide backstory and insight into recent articles in the Journal of Literacy Research and Reading Research Quarterly.
First Book, a nonprofit organization with the mission to give children from low-incomes families the opportunity to read and own their first new books, has partnered with the Human-Computer Interaction Lab, Sirius Thinking, and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop to examine new ways to deliver printed and digitally formatted books to low-income and minority children in the U.S. Click here to read more about the First Book Literacy Initiative.
Mary Lundeberg, a co-director and principal investigator in the Literacy Achievement Research Center at Michigan State University, has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to develop computer simulations of laboratory procedures employed by research scientists, along with a series of cases for investigative, problem-based learning involving bioinformatics (i.e., the study of how individuals, organizations, and systems process information). The four-year, multi-institution project will focus the designing cases on biomedical problems like cancer, malaria, STDs, and food-borne pathogens such as E. coli.
Amazon plans to enter the student textbook market with a new version of its Kindle e-book reader. Publishers now offer online versions of their textbooks, but a portable, workable e-book reader has not yet drawn publishers to design their textbook content for this niche of the marketplace. The new model of Kindle is likely to include student-friendly features like an annotation maker. Read more in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Two well-known commercial reading programs--Open Court and Reading Mastery--have not earned approval from the What Works Clearinghouse because there are no studies that satisfy the agency's rigorous evidence standards. Both programs have been adopted by some of the nation's largest school districts and have meet the strict requirements for research-based programs under the federal Reading First initiative. For more information, read Kathleen Kennedy Manzo's article in Education Week.
The NCTE Executive Committee adopted a Definition of 21st-Century Literacies for use by classroom teachers, curriculum developers, and policy makers. Among the skill sets that 21st-century readers and writiers need to develop, are to:
This article is the first in a series of New York Times articles that will look at how the Internet and other technological and social forces are changing the way people read. LARC researcher Rand Spiro is quoted in the article, citing his work on reading and learning online.
This report, which is an interim evaluation of Reading First, found that the program did have positive, statistically significant impacts on the total class time spent on the five essential components of reading instruction promoted by the program. The study also found that, on average across the 18 study sites, Reading First did not have statistically significant impacts on student reading comprehension test scores in grades 1-3. A final report on the impacts from 2004-2007 (three school years with Reading First funding) and on the relationships between changes in instructional practice and student reading comprehension is expected in late 2008.
