Printing Content and Context: Digital Libraries and Education

Content and Context: Digital Libraries and Education

Tom Reeves, University of Georgia

Len Simutis, Eisenhower National Clearinghouse

Moderator Alfred Moy�, NSDL National Visiting Committee

Notes - Content and Context: Digital Libraries and Education

Tom Reeves

"quality" is subjective

can't not involve users in NSDL development - products will fail

we need to add context to NSDL

traditional approaches to research will not work for education research and DL educational impact

new model of "development research"

right now we have a solution but haven't identified the problem

research goals � two axes of question for understanding and considerations of use � most educational research fulfills neither

development research �need to identify content and pedagogy rather than technology
DLs have potential for revolutionizing use of technology in education, but historically the impacts of technology on education have been poor
Technology has been underused and oversold �teachers mostly still using technology to support existing teaching practices
We need to pay attention to alignment of resources with teacher concerns of content, assessment, standards, pedagogy

Stokes research

fundamental understanding
considerations of use
we need research focused primarily on considerations of use, but out of that research, fundamental principles and theories can be developed

Most classroom teaching emphasizes lower order skills with one right answer but DLs can encourage higher order thinking with multiple perspectives also teacher-centered vs. learner-centered, providing access to real world data, shifting assessment to focus on mental models and intellectual curiosity instead of discrete knowledge

Larry Cubert - Stanford

Oversold & Underused

most teachers don't use technology at all in K-12
2 decades of strong support of technology at Stanford has little affected the university - it is still lecture dominated

textbook - prepackaged data

Vasa - warship - 1628 - meant to win the war for king of Sweden

first ship to have 3 hexa guns
sank 20 minutes into maiden voyage
found ship in 1960s and raised it, placing it into a museum
they knew it was going to sink
www.vasamuseet.se

Len Simutis

We should ask ourselves what role we want NSDL to have had when we look back

2008 will be 6 years into No Child Left Behind Act - funds apportioned to states and how states use those funds

"all schools are parochial schools" - localized in their interests and perspectives

teachers will tell you decisions are made classroom by classroom, sometimes district by district, not at the state or national level

there are not enough quality math and science teachers - shifts into teaching market may reflect current job market not a change in desire for adults to teach

there is little we can do in next five years to interest teachers in using technologies

NCLB

continuous improvement model - no matter how well you did last year, you must do better
assessments are going to lowest bidder
marketplace to which NSDL must be connected is ????
by 2008, many schools will be found wanting and turned over to state for new administration and maybe new ways of teaching

Point 1

We need to think not how best to teach with technology, but how best to learn with technology

schools are among least productive environments
schools viewed as bloated beaureacracies
schools are not time and place independent environments
many impediments faced in working with schools over next 5 years
Example - US company manufacturing drill bits - competition from japanese firm that did it cheaper and better - so they looked at their business model and changed the model

so NSDL can change its views

Point 2

significant system of NSDL needs to look into distributed learning approach
need to be more focused on distributed learning resources and capabilities
Cliff Lynch said information repositories and metadata repositories ?-building blocks used to create instructional activities
experience in building and creating information repositories
little in building learning object repositories
creating an environment
find a small number of things that will be important

Point 3

contextualize the work of NSDL into a real world setting
data we have shows that USA is not greatest educational system although we tend to think that
so work deliberately to identify activites that can be used in instructional standards that support state standards for science and mathematics
teachers have tools that analyze assessment results
need to build distributed sytem
put them in places where teachers and others will be looking for them
need highly distributed model that puts NSDL a click away from resources that teacher is seeking - addresses issues of distributed schools, that a lot of technology is not available to teachers

DLs are advocates of time independent, place independent resources. YET K-12 schools are far from time and place independent.

Question - How could repository differ from ENC online?

It's pushing ENC online into school districts used by the states - it's distributing a lot of resources that schools will find of value

some school districts don't want teachers to know about state standards, it's enough for them to know about standards adopted by the school/district

??? still see huge variability in how the standards are implemented in the classroom

Question - Surprised to hear that teachers are resistant to state standards - find that teachers want inquiry-based and other ways they can create creative activities?

Len - I did not mean to imply that teachers are indifferent to state standards

if we can find resources that meet colorado's and indiana's needs, so much the better

Tom - hope scholarship - new governor wants it to be tied to SAT scores rather than grade average - but it doesn't take into account the inherent bias in those tests against minorities

Assessment is our problem (as Len said) - we're still assessing as we did 50 years ago

Len

Ohio has software for college remediation in mathematics, it's extensible to high school classes and useful in workplace for where people need to learn a new skill
so it was designed for a particular audience but is being more widely used

elements of many resources can be repurposed

Tom

great potential of DLs is not as a technology to learn from but a tool to learn with
in K-12 schools, there hasn't been a lot of work on using technology as cognitive tools
history tool - control group & technology-mediated group - end of unit, no statistical difference b/t 2 groups in same teacher-prepared assessment
one year later - control group couldn't remember the civil war specifics and defined history as facts about the past - constructivist group defined history as interprations of the past and remembered much better

Question - Are there ways we can scaffold learning of heterogeneous groups of people?

Comments

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(pac) - October 14
Can you post Len Simutis' Powerpoint presentation?